Facing Postmodernity: French Intellectual Thought on Culture and Society

Facing Postmodernity

This book discusses some of the major responses to postmodernity by contemporary French thinkers. Through chapters on the city, new racism, post-Holocaust debates, the crisis of culture and questions of new citizenship, it explores postmodern interconnections between culture and society. A number of major themes prominent in Western societies today are discussed here, including questions of history, representation, identity, community, ethics and rights. France embodied in a unique way the ideological and political aspirations of modernity which are now in crisis. French thinkers and commentators are caught between the nostalgic longing for a unified republic of citizens and an awareness of the pluralism and fragmentation of contemporary processes, a condition that many people in the Western democracies are experiencing. This book is therefore aimed not only at those with an interest in France but at anyone wanting to know more about the recent debates around identity and community at the time of the millennium.

Max Silverman is senior lecturer in French at the University of Leeds.

SOCIAL FUTURES SERIES Barry Smart

Facing Postmodernity Contemporary French thought on culture and society Max Silverman

London and N ew York

First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Thi s edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Lbrary, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 Max Silverman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electro nic, mechanical, o r other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Silverman, Maxim. Facing postmodernity: contemporary French thought on culture and society/Max Silverman p. cm. -(Social futures) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. France-Civilization-1945- 2. PostmodernismFrance. 3. France-Intellectual life-20th centurySocial aspects. 1. Title. II. Series: Routledge social futures series. D C33.7.S575 1999 944.082-dc21 98-36493 CIP ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

0-415-12893-5 0-415-12894-3 0-203-00335-7 0-203-20601-0

(hbk) (Pbk) Master e-book ISBN (Glassbook Format)

For Nina, Rosa, Sam, Anna and Joe, with love

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: The unmaking of modern France

ix 1

1

In the shadow of the Holocaust The Holocaust rediscovered 10 Jews: 'Greeks' and the decline of the West 13 Jews andpoets 24 History, memory, representation 29 New ethics, new dangers 38

10

2

New racisms Modern 'logics' of racism 40 Culture, difference and identity 44 The 'ends' of anti-racism 57

40

3

City spaces The modern city 66 From time to space,from the social to the aesthetic 72 Encounters in the city 86 Making connections 91

66

4

Cultural debates From Culture to Ie culture! 96 Culture and society 102 The 'democratization' of the image 108 Culture, counter-culture and intellectuals 117

96

V ll1

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Contents

Citizens all? Utopian citizenship 128 The revenge of civil society 134 The end of the social? 142

128

Conclusion: Millennium talk

154

Notes Bibliography Index

175

161 191

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Zygmunt Bauman and John Schwarzmantel for their constructive comments on a first draft of this book and for their constant support for this project. I would also like to thank Leora Auslander and other members of the Chicago Group on Modern France at the University of Chicago for their helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of Chapter 3. The Department of French at the University of Leeds has provided me with the perfect environment for exploring some of the ideas expressed here and has allowed me the time and space to complete this project. Mari Shullaw at Routledge has been the model of patience while waiting for the final manuscript. My warmest and most heartfelt thanks go to Nina Biehal who has been, as always, my closest reader. Earlier drafts of ideas and arguments expressed here were first published as chapters in Silverman 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b, 1998a, 1998b. All translations from the French are my own except where otherwise stated.

Introduction The unmaking of modern France

France was the quintessential modern nation-state. Nowhere else did the star of equality, freedom and solidarity burn so bright. Yet nowhere else was that brightness deemed to be under such threat of eclipse by visions of disharmony and backwardness. France epitomized the essential Janusface of modernity. On the one hand, French Enlightenment philosophy provided the concepts for the pursuit of a higher form of humanity. The Revolution of 1789 was the political blueprint for transforming those concepts into 'natural' law and became the model adopted by nascent nationalisms elsewhere. The spirit of French republicanism, embodied in the slogan 'the one and indivisible Republic (Ia Republique une et indivisible)', symbolized the persistence of that Utopian dream of a shared humanity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the fIrst half of the twentieth century. This was a dream founded on a passionate belief in the power of reason and science to usher in the new dawn. And which nation had greater faith in reason than France? Yet, on the other hand, reason, science and a new transcendent humanity were dependent on the stigmatization of their opposites: ignorance, superstition and sub-human species. As Alain Touraine has observed: the dominant image of modernity is that of a world which opens up to human action guided by reason, in which the barriers of tradition, belief and privilege are transcended, a world which is unifying and in which universalist values, those of science and the law, sweep away the shadows of ignorance, superstition and arbitrary taste. (Dubet and Wieviorka 1995:21) Touraine's description highlights the double-headed nature of modernity: facing towards the light but for ever casting anxious glances

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back at the shadows which must be removed. To proclaim France as the quintessential modern nation-state is therefore to suggest that it was there that the Utopian construction of 'Man' and new visions of sub-human life-that is, the Apollonian and Dionysiac faces of modernity respectively-find their most complete expression. The space of rationality, science, history, civilization and universality, which was the cornerstone of the French Enlightenment, could only be realized against the backcloth of new concepts of madness, belief, stasis, barbarity and parochialism. The lightness of being of the French Lumieres hence called forth its demons. Modernity was therefore not so much a reaction against the forces of backwardness which had to be transcended in the name of progress and history. Instead, it was the construction of those 'dark' forces at the same moment as the construction of civilization and humanity. The unity and autonomy of the modern 'self' was an illusory coherence underpinned irrevocably by the diversity, contradictions and ambivalence of the modern ' other'. They were two sides of the same coin, the unconscious tracking of the conscious mind, as Freud was to discover. However, the task of Enlightenment thought, in its pursuit of a higher form of humanity, was not simply to disentangle the light from the shadows but to construct them as two separate realms, to depict the ambivalent Janus-face in terms of a dichotomy. And although this process of boundary-drawing was a fundamental feature of modernity in general, we might once again suggest that France was exemplary. For in which nation were rationality and the irrational, science and superstition, nation and race orchestrated so systematically as ideological opposites as in France? French modernity was built on the clear distinction between separate realms which organized knowledge, culture and humanity (and therefore power) into a hierarchy of terms, the creation of what we now call (after deconstructionist philosophy and feminist and post-colonial theory) binary opposites. Science, rationality, the public sphere, the nation, 'Man', the universal were all elevated to the lofty realm of transcendent humanity by displacing all elements of ideology, tradition, particularisms and backwardness on to others: the 'dangerous classes', women, colonial subjects,Jews and other marginals, the private sphere. Modernity was a perpetual struggle to control and repress, assimilate or expel the opposite terms in each binary, the inferior elements in each hierarchy, in order to fix the boundaries of humanity, progress, civilization and order. Of all the modern industrializing nations of the nineteenth century, none pursued this Utopian dream with the same vigour as France. The clearest manifestation of this lies in the development, in the second

The unmaking of modern France

3

half of the nineteenth century, of a state-based, centralizing, unitarian and strictly non-pluralist model of the nation, with its sharp divide between the public and private spheres. The homogenizing zeal of republicanism under the Third Republic (1871-1940), born from the mission to vanquish the 'forces of reaction' and to fuse the nation into an indissoluble unity in the name of rationality and progress, did not have its direct equivalents elsewhere. The assimilation of diverse people around common goals, leading to a mad quest for uniformity in the name of equality, was not the obsessive driving force behind the institutions of the state and the intellectuals of progress in the same way as it became in France. Hence, the tensions between uniformity and difference, order and disorder, progress and reaction, science and belief, seem sharper in France. For the greater the quest for assimilation of differences and the unification of diversity, the more visible difference and diversity became. The impossible dream of a public sphere purified of all ideology and partisanship was at the expense of relegating all partisanship (or particularisms) to the private sphere, which seethed with the 'waste' which any such dream inevitably generates. French modernity therefore epitomized the essential paradox of the drive for uniformity in the name of equality, since the pursuit of sameness was both a source of emancipation (for some) and the repression of difference. On the one hand, the ideals of reason, equality and citizenship could eventually save Alfred Dreyfus, at the turn of the century, from being condemned for treason simply by dint of being Jewish. On the other hand, those same ideals could legitimize the 'civilizing mission' of colonialism abroad and nationbuilding at home (again, two sides of the same coin), and thus become the ideological tools of colonial racism and intolerance towards minorities, condemning 'inferior' and 'backward' peoples to ' subject' status because of their failure to match up to the universal values of 'humanity'. We now understand some of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in French modernity's hierarchical system of classification. Yet these were first exposed at the time of the construction of the system itself-in the form of cultural modernism. Rationalizing modernity's classification of distinct spheres was in fact the essential motor for the counter-cultures of modernism. Modernism thrived on the transgression of boundaries-between order and disorder, between uniformity and heterogeneity, between the public and private spheres -and the confusion of distinct realms. Marginality, the transitory, diversity, imagination and desire-indeed, the whole

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panoply of 'dark' forces and processes which constituted the otherness of rational order- were central to cultural modernism's challenge to the permanence and coherence of rationalized modern society. Is it too much of an exaggeration, then, to suggest that here too, in the major cultural movements of modernity, France epitomizes most clearly modernity's fundamental ambivalence? From Baudelaire to Surrealism and beyond, the fleeting and heterogeneous nature of modern everyday life (especially ci ty life) was aes theticized and mythologized, hence removing it from the rational framework of positivist and utilitarian political and economic planning, and inserting it within a different space, in which the boundaries between subjective desire and external 'reality', imagination and rational design, the psyche and the social, the unconscious and conscious, are blurred. If it is true that Paris was the centre of modernist ferment at the end of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century, then there is a strong case to be made in favour of viewing France as the paradigm of the modern struggle between culture and counter-culture. France was arguably the quintessential modern nation-state because the profound ambivalence and tensions at the heart of modernity were expressed with greater clarity there than in other modern industrializing nations. The drive for uniformity was more systematically theorized and institutionalized while, at the same time, the detritus of that process was more heroically championed by opponents of rationalization. What, though, of today, for this book deals essentially with the contemporary crisis of the structures of modernity? Today is no longer the heyday of the modern nation-state or the high point of cultural modernism. Terms like post-industrial, postmodern, post-communist, post-historical and post-ideological illustrate the attempt to articulate profound shifts which have taken place in modern (and mostly Western) industrialized societies. If modernity was intricately connected with industrial society and class conflict (Schwarzmantel 1998), the nationalizing mission of the state, colonialism and the cultural avant-garde, then today's transformations in the industrial fabric of society, the attack on the so-called sovereignty of the nation-state from above and below (through globalization and localization), post-colonialism and the broadening of the cultural sphere to encompass what were formerly designated as the political and social spheres, all bear witness to the crisis of modernity. In France, ' crisis' seems to be the most popular term employed to describe this predicament (although malaise must run it a close second: see, for example, Yonnet 1993; 'Malaise dans la democratie' in Le Dibat

The unmaking of modern France

5

1988; 'Autour du malaise fran<;ais' in Le Dibat 1993). Commentators talk of the crisis of the modern nation-state, the crisis of universalist values, the crisis of assimilation (or integration), the crisis of civilization. Pluralism challenges uniformity, relativism challenges truth, hierarchies have been flattened, assimilation has broken down, the margins are at the centre. A sense of history has given way to an undifferentiated present. Faith in the future and progress has dissolved into a multitude of anxieties about the self and the world. Science and rationality are viewed sceptically and must compete with other belief systems as ways of interpreting the world. Nobody has any all-encompassing solutions any more, for interconnections are all too complex today, and anyway, we are, as the philosopher Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard (1979) famously remarked, at the 'end of grand narratives'. Krysztof Pomian (1990) observes that the transformation from the age of 'isms' to the age of 'posts' signifies the passage from an age of confidence and certainty to one rooted in fear and uncertainty. Alain Mine (1993:205) wonders whether this signals the 'degree zero of ideology' and, consequently, the end of 'modern times'. It is perhaps the breakdown of the sharp boundaries constituted by cognitive social planning and the 'contamination' of distinct realms which perhaps best characterizes this sense of crisis. The paradoxes, contradictions and ambivalence of hierarchical systems of classification explored by the cultural avant-garde at the turn of the century have now become our everyday reality. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambivalence and moral relativism are no longer confined to the margins but have become the general rule (cf. Bauman 1991a). The spirit of cultural modernism (offering a more profound vision of reality than rationalized Utopias) has been 'democratized' and in the process, some would argue, stripped of its radical potential and converted into a simple object of consumption among others. This breakdown in a fixed order of principles and values, and the clash between culture and counterculture, signals the end of the high points of modernity and cultural modernism, and the moment of transition towards a different order. In other words, today the hierarchical structures of modernity are in crisis. As I will argue in the following pages, we are facing postmodernity.l France, of course, is not alone in facing a crisis in the structures of modernity. Postmodernity has been a major theme for debate in numerous countries for at least two decades. Yet once again I would want to make out a case for the exemplary nature of the French situation today. I contend that the level of 'malaise' experienced in France is in direct proportion to the idealized perception of the French

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Enlightenment tradition of modernity. The mythology surrounding the French republican model of the nation and culture is simply not matched elsewhere. The sense of crisis in France today therefore frequently appears sharper than in other countries because of the widely held perception in France that that model-founded on universalism, progress, the political nation, republicanism, the word, Culture -is being resolutely effaced by contemporary trends. Intellectual debates are often framed in terms of the threat that today's democratic processes pose to the values of the Republic (and, implicitly or explicitly, in terms of the 'Anglo-Saxon' threat to what Charles de Gaulle called ' a certain idea of France'). On the other hand, perhaps it is not too simplistic to suggest that the power of this archetypal Enlightenment model of the Republic (and the fixity of the binary oppositions which held it in place) is also responsible for the strength of the backlash that one finds in French anti-humanist and deconstructionist philosophy, which has had such a major effect on postmodern critical thought elsewhere. Contemporary French debates on culture and society often appear to be caught between a profound nostalgia for a golden age of culture and national unity and an extreme rejection of the hierarchies that characterized that age. It could very well be the case, then, that the quintessential modern nation-state, characterized by the culture and counter-cultures of rationality, has today evolved into the nation-state which most clearly epitomizes the crisis of modernity. It is for this reason that the French debates around the crisis of modernity are of special interest. The rearguard action to preserve the 'purity' of the 'republican tradition' -abstract equality, citizenship, secularism (ia iaii:iti), the separation between the public and private spheres-in the face of the contemporary processes of democratization, diversification and fragmentation produces a particular tension and passion to these debates which signals a specifically French purchase on them. In France, the term 'postmodernity' itself is often employed only in the context of a tragic vision of the decline of humanity. Clearly there are many overlaps here with the experiences of other Western democracies, and much of the discussion in this book is informed by the wider debates around postmodernity. But facing postmodernity presents both a common and a different challenge for individual countries (and their major theorists) and it is precisely this balance between common processes and a particular French response that this book considers. This book therefore attempts to chart some of the most important responses in France to the wider crisis in the structures of modernity. It deals with debates and ideas rather than policy and practice. It does not claim to be a survey of recent political and cultural developments

The unmaking of modern France

7

in France, although the discussion often makes reference to these developments. It is, instead, an engagement with recent trends in French intellectual history concerning culture and society. My focus is therefore not so much on France as on contemporary French thought, although the complex interweaving of ideas and practices makes this a tenuous distinction. Even here I make no claims for an exhaustive coverage of recent debates. My purpose is to consider some of the major themes that recur in these debates and some of the important contributors to them. A number of the theorists discussed are already familiar outside France, while others will be less familiar to an English-speaking audience. If the backdrop to the following discussion is the specific nature of French modernity and my starting point the crisis in the structures of modernity, my treatment of the response to this crisis is then pursued through a consideration of five areas, which constitute the main part of the text: post-Holocaust debates, new racisms, the city, cultural debates and questions of citizenship. This choice of topics is, in a sense, arbitrary. Others might well have been included in a book on contemporary French debates. Yet the choice is dictated by two overlapping concerns: the first is the relationship between culture and society today and the second is the relationship between the individual and the community in a transformed landscape and the vexed question of a new ethics vis-a-vis ' the other'. The topics I have chosen allow an exploration of these themes in different contexts and an engagement with significant aspects of the crisis of modernity in France at the time of the millennium. I start with reflections on the Holocaust because of the important symbolic role that this event has come to play in the wider discussion around modernity and postmodernity. A specific purchase on 'Auschwitz' and 'the Jew' has been crucial to the assault by anti-humanist and anti-representationalist French philosophy on the Western Enlightenment tradition. My intention is not to survey French poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought (which has been treated extensively elsewhere) but rather to point up the problematic nature of adopting 'Auschwitz' as a paradigm for the failure of Western modernity and the figure of 'the Jew' as a paradigm for 'otherness' (a/firifi). The second chapter discusses the ways in which concepts of difference and identity are at the heart of new racisms today. Following my previous work in this area (Silverman 1992), I suggest that the French response to new racisms has been largely over-determined by the powerful republican model of the nation which consigns difference to the undemocratic, exclusionary and racist traditions of the far Right. I argue that another paradigm for the understanding of difference and

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identity, more appropriate to the pluralism and diversity of contemporary societies, is a prerequisite for the reformulation of democracy today. Chapters 3 and 4, on the city and culture respectively, broaden out the discussion to encompass wider social and cultural transformations. The city has become an important site for the consideration of postmodern developments and there is now an extensive literature which deals with it. My discussion makes use of some of this literature from diverse sources. However, my specific focus is on French commentators on the city whose reflections frequently express regret for the passing of the modern city as a site of meeting and memory. Contemporary debates around the nature and function of culture overlap with many of the themes to be found in discussions of the city, especially those concerning the collapse of a sense of depth, meaning and a hierarchy of values. I consider whether this collapse of hierarchies and the rise of an 'anything goes' eclectic ethos signifies the flowering or the demise of marginal and transgressive countercultures. If, as Steven Connor (1989:61) says of the work of JeanFran<;ois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, 'postmodernity may be defined as those plural conditions in which the social and the cultural become indistinguishable', then a crucial question for our times is whether this blurring of boundaries and conflation of the 'separate' spheres of culture and society is in the name of a democratic pluralism or a triumphant commodity capitalism. The final chapter pursues this question in relation to contemporary debates around citizenship: does the breakdown of the boundary between the public and private spheres signify 'the end of the social' in favour of a rampant individualism, or can citizenship, solidarity and democracy be rethought in accordance with the new times in which we live? I argue that the stumbling block in France to such a rethinking is, once again, the power of the republican concept of nation and citizenship and its stigmatization of difference. However, there are those who recognize the anachronistic nature of this model and argue for a less abstract and more pluralistic version of citizenship. The conclusion to the book suggests that, despite the new dangers inherent in negotiating difference today, the abstract vision of 'Man' at the heart of the project of French modernity must surely give way in the new millennium to a less Utopian and more pluralistic version of humanity. It is hoped that the framework adopted for this book will shed light on some of the most important and persistent debates of recent times while drawing specific attention to the French contributions to these debates. However, the choice of topics and the recurrence of a number

The unmaking of modern France

9

of themes across all chapters inevitably reflect my own concerns as much as those of the theorists discussed. I attempt to avoid either an unconditional celebration or a bitter denigration of 'postmodern times' by adopting a more nuanced stance. Whether 'the other' is any safer under postmodern conditions than under modern conditions is, I believe, an open question. The sociologist and major theorist of postmodern times, Zygmunt Bauman (1991 b), has characterized postmodernity as both chance and menace (cf. Beck 1992). It is under the sign of this new Janus-face that this book has been written.

1

In the shadow of the Holocaust

The Holocaust rediscovered

In the immediate post-war years, discussion of the catastrophe that had just taken place rarely mentioned the plight of the Jews or the genocide which became known as the Holocaust. In Le Spectateur engage, Raymond Awn recalls his conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945 about this silence: We asked ourselves the question why is there not one single article, not one that says: 'Welcome home to Jews, back once more in the French community.' The fundamental reason for this silence is that what had happened had been erased. (cited in Finkielkraut 1996:41) Sartre himself remarked on this silence about the Jews in his famous Rijlexions sur fa question juive (1954) written in 1946 (although this same book contains no references to the Holocaust itself), and the anti-racist organisation MRAP (Movement against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples) was established in 1949 with the specific aim of preserving the memory of victims of anti-Semitism and guarding against its reappearance in all its forms. It is also true, as Michael Bernstein (1998) points out, that David Rousset's L'Univers concentrationnaire (1946), Robert Antelme's L 'Espece humaine (1947) and novels by Roger Ikor (Les Fils d'Avrom: Les Eaux melees) and Andre Schwarz-Bart (Le Dernier desjustes) in the 1950s show that serious work about the Holocaust was being written shortly after the war in France. Yet these were isolated voices. As the film-maker and critic Claude Lanzmann has said, in an explicit reference to Sartre's work on antiSemitism, 'the Holocaust is an event [which] no one at the time could grasp in its full scope' (cited in Kritzman 1995a:5).

In the shado ]}} of the H olocaust

11

In fact, the talk in the immediate post-war years was predominantly of the victims of and resistance to fascism, not anti-Semitism. As the Belgian historian Jean-Michel Chaumont points out: this was the era of the almost absolute hegemony of the anti-fascist model. The survivor from Buchenwald was the emblematic witness of Nazi crimes and it was his or her version of history and experience, filtered by organizations usually under the direction of the Communist Party, which was transmitted via the media to the public. Even in 1967, at the time of the inauguration of the international monument at Birkenau, Jews were hardly mentioned in official discourse and the plaques erected at the monument were dedicated to the indistinct mass of 'victims of Nazi barbarism'.l (Chaumont 1994:77) The 'anti-fascist model' was itself bound up with the process of 'epuration (cleansing)' after the war, whose raison d'etre was to purge France of foreign (German) influences, to marginalize Vichy (and certainly fascism) from mainstream French republicanism, and confirm the story of a France which heroically resisted occupation (cf. Rousso 1987).2 At this time, it was not simply a question of the hegemony of the anti-fascist model for the revelations about the camps in the USSR provided another model for extermination of 'undesirables'.3 Annette Wieviorka (1992:20) refers to these two post-war debates-anti-fascist and anti-communist-which both, in their different ways, removed attention from the specificity of Nazi crimes, the Holocaust and the annihilation of the Jews. It seems astonishing today that Alain Resnais's classic film about the Holocaust, Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955) -made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the end of the warmakes virtually no reference to Jews. But this becomes understandable if we remember to what extent, in those post-war years, 'the perception of genocide was in France inextricably associated with that of deportation to Nazi concentration camps' (A.Wieviorka 1992:20), a process which, of course, involved non-Jews as well as Jews. 4 As Eric Conan and Daniel Lindenberg observe, France preferred 'political and resistance deportees to so-called "racial" deportees'. The relationship between Vichy and the 'final solution' was merely of secondary importance. The majority of condemnations arising from the epuration, based on a classical body of law, invoked Article 75 of the penal code which refers to 'intelligence with the enemy'. The notion of crimes against humanity, defined in 1945 and used in 1946 at

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the Nuremberg trial, was never invoked. And the question of state anti-Semitism, which was introduced spontaneously and independently by the Vichy regime, was not the object of any specific judicial debates (Conan and Lindenberg 1992:10) (cf. I<Jarsfeld and Rousso 1992).

In the aftermath of the war, the attention of the newly created Fourth Republic was focused elsewhere, especially on the Cold War, the struggle against communism and colonial wars in the Far East and North Africa (Edwy Plene!, 'Le piege Touvier', Le Monde, 22 April 1992). This relative silence about the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period (and 'occultation' of the genocide of the Jews) seems astonishing today in the light of the sea-change that has occurred in perceptions of that event. At the beginning of the 1970s, the death of Charles de Gaulle (1969) and the challenge to the great resistance myth that he personified-epitomized by Marcel Ophuls's documentary Le Chagrin et la piM (1971) and Robert Paxton's book (1972) on Vichy France- opened the way to a reappraisal of the question of anti-Semitism and the relationship between Vichy and the 'final solution'. Since then the Holocaust-recognized as the genocide of the Jews, and frequently referred to now as the Shoahhas become the major focus for commentators on that period. 5 This ' judeocentric' approach (Chaumont 1994) has brought to the fore the experience and the memories of survivors as witnesses, the question of crimes against humanity, and the irreducible nature of the event itself. Annette Wieviorka (1992:19) lists the proliferation of debates and controversies about the Holocaust which have taken place in France over the last twenty-five years, including 'the Faurisson affair, the affair of the American soap-opera Holocaust, the Roques affair, the affair of the convent at Auschwitz, the Barbie trial, the indictments of Leguay, Touvier, Papon and Bousquet, the affair of Le Pen's "detail", and the Carpentras affair', to which we might add the controversies over Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah (1985), the Farias/ Heidegger affair, and the Paul de Man affair. This obsession with the Holocaust in recent years is as linked to the contemporary conjuncture as much as the former silence around it was a product of the post-war period. The challenge to the Gaullist and communist myths about the Second World War, and the accompanying charge of French involvement in the 'final solution', are themselves symptomatic of a new problematic around national identity and national history which was taking shape during the 1960s.

In the shado]}} of the Holocaust

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New demands for 'the right to difference' for minorities (Ie droit d la difference), the challenge to the state's monolithic hold on memories of national history, and the anti- and post-colonial critique of the ethnocentrism and racism of the West in general all threatened the postwar consensus on national unity. Furthermore, there was a renewal of Jewish thought in the 1960s (especially that of Emmanuel Levinas) which had a considerable influence on French anti-humanist philosophy and the challenge to 'the order of the ego, self-consciousness and freedom' (Rose 1993:14) of rationalizing Western modernity. In other words, the rediscovery of the Holocaust is symptomatic of the crisis of modern France and Western modernity as a whole. Michael Bernstein (1998) suggests that the contemporary obsession with 'the issues raised by the Nazi genocide' is not so much a question of the return of the repressed but rather 'our readiness to see those issues as simultaneously unique to the devastation of European Jewry and yet paradigmatic for Western culture as a whole'. In France this obsession epitomizes a country ill at ease not only with its own involvement in genocide but also with the very ideals of modernity which France upheld. The following discussion therefore considers not those events connected directly with the Vichy regime (about which much has been written in recent years; see, for example, Rousso 1987, Esprit 1992, Kedward and Wood, eds, 1995) but some of the ways in which the Holocaust, and also the figure of 'the Jew', have been mobilized in the wider contemporary polemic around the crisis of Western modernity. In terms of the philosophical debate, this polemic has pitted humanist neo-Kantians against anti-humanist Heideggerians; in terms of the cultural debate, it has pitted neo-representationalists against anti-representationalists. It could be defined as the moment at which the post-Holocaust era meets the postmodern era.

'Jews', 'Greeks' and the decline of the West The pronouncement by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno on the impossibility of thought after Auschwitz transformed the Holocaust into a metaphor for the end of modernity. Auschwitz became the point of transition from an age of rational planning of societies- whose ultimate goal was human emancipation and freedom-to one of scepticism of all social engineering. As the political and cultural commentator and editor of the journal Esprit, Olivier Mongin, observes, 'Adorno's question on the possibility of thought after Auschwitz exacerbated a profound scepticism at the heart of modern society'

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(Mongin 1994a:73). For some, the Holocaust has become the sign of the totalitarian nature of the West, and the point of departure for a rejection of all totalizing systems of thought. Zygmunt Bauman (1988), for example, has argued that the absence of a moral dimension which made the Holocaust possible was a direct product of the technological and bureaucratic instrumentalism of modern industrial society. Adorno's injunction is therefore the starting point for what one might term postmodern philosophy's 'appropriation' of 'Auschwitz' for the purpose of challenging Western philosophy. Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard (1988a:110) recognizes his debt to Adorno: 'Following Theodor Adorno, I have used the name "Auschwitz" to signify the inconsistency between the course of Western histor y and the "modern" project of the emancipation of humanity.' For Lyotard, Auschwitz signifies the tragic end of modernity's grand vision of emancipation and a cruel indictment of the concept of history on which it was founded. After Auschwitz the 'grand narrative' of history dissolves into the 'small narratives (petits recits) , of particular knowledges and fragmented spaces of communication (Lyotard 1979). 'Auschwitz' therefore signifies the end of universalism and the end of the Enlightenment idea of progress. In short, Lyo tard employs 'Auschwitz' as a metaphor for the failure of the whole enterprise of modernity. As he says, "'Auschwitz" can be taken as a paradigmatic name for the tragic failure of modernity' (Lyotard 1988a:32).6Hence the quote marks surrounding the name to designate its paradigmatic function. For Lyotard, and for all those commentators mentioned above, 'Auschwitz' is not simply the product of fascist ideology but of a whole tradition of Western philosophy and history. The logocentrism of Western thought and the evolutionist concept of history inherited from Hegel (both of which are founded on binary oppositions) are two of the principal pillars propping up the modern edifice-which have produced dictatorships and democracies alike. There is therefore a 'contamination' (Derrida 1987) at a more profound level across modern conceptual and political structures which challenges the neat distinction between democracy and dictatorship. (This point will be developed later in this chapter; see' History, memory, representation '.) The philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1988-1989:484) employs 'Auschwitz' in the same way to castigate the West in general: 'In the apocalypse at Auschwitz, it is no more or less than the essence of the West that is revealed-and that has not ceased since that time to reveal itself.' The West is ultimately responsible for the attempted annihilation of 'the other' which took place at Auschwitz, and it is therefore the whole

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system underpinning the Enlightenment tradition which stands indicted. It is not simply Jews who died in the gas chambers but the very spirit of modernity itself. Auschwitz becomes the metaphorical dividing line between modernity and postmodernity. A significant aspect of this postmodern critique of modernity and the West is the link traced between rationality, Christianity and the Greco-Roman tradition of thought, within which Judaism has been a perpetual outsider and victim, and which reached its apotheosis at Auschwitz. Once again the critique is aimed not simply at those forms of modern political anti-Semitism which overtly stigmatized the Jew, but at modernity as a whole in its dealings with 'the other'. LacoueLabarthe gives a clear expression of this position: God effectively died at Auschwitz, in any case the God of the Greco-Christian West, and it is no coincidence that those who were the objects of extermination were the witnesses, in that West, of another origin of God, one which remains outside the Hellenic and Roman framework and which therefore impedes its programme of fulfilment. (cited in Mongin 1988:91) Here the Jew and Judaism are perceived as 'o ther' to 'Christian Europe', 'other' to rationality, logocentrism and the law, and 'other' to the autonomous and self-constituted self at the heart of Western 'Hellenic' humanistic philosophy. The Jew is that which, ultimately, gives the lie to the grand modern vision of totality, harmony, purity and order, and is the witness to modernity's reckless pursuit of uniformity. In this sense, ' the Jew' is equivalent to what Julia Kristeva (following Freud) calls 'the disturbing strangeness ... which inhabits us alL .. the hidden face of our identity, the space which challenges our fixed nature' (Kristeva 1988:9). Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have all mobilized the figure of ' the Jew' in this way: as a sign of otherness and strangeness, that which is left out, leftover, suppressed, eradicated in modernity's mad rush towards the creation of a rational order, and that which unsettles all attempts at fixing and recuperation. 'The Jew' is therefore a sign of otherness. In Heidegger et 'les juifs', Lyotard writes 'jew' not only in inverted commas but also with a lowercase 'j' in order to distinguish these 'jews' -employed figuratively or allegorically-from real Jews. Lyotard's 'jews' are the sign of the challenge to the perfect autonomy and unity of the self. He says:

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'the jews' are in 'the spirit' of the West .. . they are that which resists this spirit, in its wilfulne ss, the wilfulne ss of wanting, that which impedes this wilfulness, in its accomplishment, project and progress, that which ceaselessly opens up the wound of what is unaccomplished .. . . They are that which resists domestication within the obsession to dominate, within the compulsive quest for the acquisition of property, within the passion for empire, recurrent since Hellenic Greece and Christian Rome. 'The jews' are never at home wherever they may be, they cannot be integrated, converted or expelled. They are always outsiders even when they are in their own place, within their own traditions, since at their very origin is exodus, excision, impropriety and respect for what has been forgotten. (Lyotard 1988b:45) Nancy (1986) invokes 'the jew' as the allegorical marker of the interruption or disruption of myth and community. Lyotard (1993: 100) makes the same point when he observes that 'the jew' is the challenge to 'the blind narcissism of the community' or again when he designates Auschwitz as a sign of the impossibility of constructing an autonomous and unproblematic 'we': 'In the camps, there was no first person plural subject. The absence of this subject means that "after Auschwitz" there is no subject at all, no Selbst which might name itself in naming "Auschwitz" .. .. There is no collective witness' (Lyotard 1983:146); 'the name "Auschwitz" is certainly not the total sum of Is, yous and hes, since this name designates the impossibility of any such totalization' (Lyotard 1983:152). Kristeva's 'stranger' is also 'a symptom which renders any "we" problematic, perhaps even impossible' (Kristeva 1988:9). Hence, if 'Auschwitz' has been adopted as a sign of the end of modernity, the figure of 'the Jew' has been similarly appropriated as a sign of difference or otherness which modernity sought to eradicate. In the figures of 'Auschwitz' and 'the Jew' postmodern anti-humanist philosophy invests its challenge to instrumental rationality, the West (defined as logocentric and Eurocentric), history and representation. 'The Jew' is cast as other to history and representation, and as other to Christianity and the European Greco-Roman tradition of philosophy, as if 'Europe (or philosophy, or the Greeks, or maybe even Christianity)' (Bennington 1998:189-190) formed an unproblematic whole. 'The Jew' personifies a new ethics as opposed to the law, openended interpretation as opposed to the incarnation of the word. 7

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The influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the direction of French postmodern philosophy over the last thirty years should not be underestimated here. Mongin (1994a:78) suggests that interest in Levinas during the 1960s was not entirely fortuitous since the nature of his thought reflected a growing preoccupation with the demise of a sense of history and a renewed interest in ethics at the expense of politics. Jacques Derrida had already devoted a long essay to the work of Levinas in L'Ecriture et la difference (1967:117-228). Derrida's decision to quote from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy as preface to this essay reflects his use of the opposition between Hebraism and Hellenism as the two poles of influence of culture. For Derrida (1967: 123), the Greek tradition at the heart of Western philosophy, which is even to be found in the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, is profoundly challenged by the thought of Levinas, for whom Hebraism is characterized by difference rather than reduction to the same. Susan Handelman, who adopts Derrida's terms uncritically, describes Derrida's fascination with Levinas in the following way:

In Levinas, Derrida finds an attempt to 'dislocate the Greek logos' and thus to dislocate our identity and the principle of identity in general, which is a summons to depart from Greece, to liberate thought from the 'oppression' of the same and the one, an 'ontological, or transcendental oppression', which Derrida claims is the source of all oppression in the world .... As psychoanalysis was a species of parricide and giving of a new law, so Derridean deconstructionism will murder the fatherfounders of philosophy and disseminate a new writing, which, in the wake of the overthrow of the same and the one, celebrates pluralism, otherness, distance, and difference. Parmenides' disregard of the other is ' totalitarian' and tautologous according to Levinas and Derrida, and the rebellion against the Greeks is a species of liberation. (Handelman 1982:171) Handelman demonstrates how Derrida's discussion of Levinas has become a major element underpinning deconstruction and the celebration of the voice of 'the other' (especially in the 'Anglo-Saxon' world). In France, other influences (apart from the usual ones of Nietzsche and Heidegger) should be mentioned in relation to this particular preoccupation of philosophy in the wake of the Holocaust. Olivier Mongin (1994a:80) mentions the importance of the translation into French of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's book Zakhor in proposing

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the same antithesis as that outlined by Handelman between the Hellenic and Hebraic traditions, for it showed how 'the Jewish imaginary has for long been distanced from historical rationality and has maintained a relation to memory which is not that of historical science'. Jean-Louis Schlegel makes a similar point in relation to the work of Franz Rosenzweig: Even in relation to the Shoah, Rosenzweig explains why contemporary philosophy, in its most creative moment, has strong affinities with Judaism, with its 'reading without images', as Emmanuel Levinas has said, which one could translate as the accepted presence of a principle of incompleteness, plurality, original difference, non-accomplishment, exteriority, and hence ethics, which Christianity (even Protestant Christianity) finds so distasteful. To paraphrase Paul Ricouer, Judaism today gives food for thought, whilst Christianity has very little to offer. (Schlegel 1990:79) (cf. Munster, ed., 1994) The suggestion here is that the attraction of Judaism, in the eyes of those for whom philosophy has become discredited through its association with totalizing systems of thought, is its difference from rationalism and its concern with the otherness and 'unknowability' of 'the other'. Pierre Bouretz demonstrates how the Hebraic tradition disrupts the rationalist concept of time and the Hegelian dialectic of history so important to the Christian West: The Jewish conception of a temporality outside history goes beyond a specifically Jewish experience. As the opposite to a Christian consciousness historicized within the State, it offers us the means of resistance to the Hegelian idea of History as 'serious, painful, patient and working through the negative'. Occupying an empty space in Hegel's version of universal history, the Jewish people give us the awareness of a plenitude of time removed from the dialectic of history. It is as if the experience of a time lived in exile has become the counterpoint to a temporality inscribed within the history of the kingdom. Exile and the kingdom: one day it will perhaps be necessary to explore the distance which separates these two symbolic spaces in Western culture. (Bouretz 1992:128) (cf. also Ricoeur 1985) Jewish exile is here the counterpoint to the Christian kingdom just as, for others cited above, Hebraism is the antithesis of Hellenism, and

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the Jew is other to the Greek. Ironically, the deconstructionist critique of a Western tradition founded on binary oppositions appears to be founded on a binary opposition of its own-between Hebraism and Hellenism, between Judaism and Christianity, and between Jew and Greek. Susan Handelman's tendentious equation between the tradition of Rabbinic thought and deconstructionist literary theory is a good case in point: As Christianity severed its ties with Judaism and spread into the Roman Empire, later to conquer Europe, it became allied with Greek philosophy (and a variety of intellectual and religious currents prevailing in the Hellenistic era), and a link was formed which provided the matrix for Western culture. (Handelman 1982:xiv) Handelman's thesis rests on a crude dichotomy in which Judaism is a cipher of otherness within the Greek logocentric tradition. She asserts: 'If Judaism is the experience of the infinitely other, it is precisely this irruption of the totally other that threatens the Greek logos, and the Christian holy family as well' (1982:173). The recruitment of Judaism as 'the other' to 'Hellenic Greece and Christian Rome' might be convenient as an allegory of anti-Western rationality, logocentrism, totalizing systems of thought, and violence but does not hold up to proper scrutiny in reality. Furthermore, it relies on a fairly monolithic, and even essentialist, view of both 'Hellenic Greece', on the one hand, and Judaism on the other. Martin Bernal's analysis of the 'Afro-Asiatic' roots of European civilization (Bernal 1987) undermines any such essentialist characterization of Europe. 8 More specifically, Mongin takes issue with Lacoue-Labarthe's caricature of the West, dependent as it is on the same sort of crude antithesis between Hellenism and Hebraism employed by Handelman: Surely the silencing of history does not simply lead to the philosophical questioning of the West? Is not the recourse to a philosophical representation of the West a confession of the weakness of thought whose only perspective on the West is that of its failure? And how accurate is it to conceive of the God of the Greco-Christian West and a God removed from Hellenic recuperation as opposites? (Mongin 1988:92)

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Gillian Rose also mounts an attack on French postmodern philosophy's demonization of rationality through the use of the opposition between the Greek and the Jew. In her fascinating book Judaism and Modernity (1993) she employs the term ' diremption' (forceful separation) to characterize the artificial construction of an antithesis between the two traditions, which she terms Athens and Jerusalem. She argues that to characterize the former in terms of philosophy and principled rationality and the latter as prophetic revelation is a false dichotomy. Her analysis of Halacha Qewish law) and her critique of Jewish thinkers like Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas demonstrate that by misrepresenting, or stereotyping, both the 'Hellenic tradition' and Judaism, an over-simplistic dichotomy has been created (Rose 1993: 16). The effect of this misrepresentation is to obscure a far more complex reality. David Stern, a specialist in the Rabbinic tradition of interpretation of the Torah (midrash), also provides an important corrective to the crude binary terms that inform Handelman's thesis, and that of others (see, for example, Grosz 1990) who similarly conflate the Jewish tradition and contemporary deconstruction. Stern observes: Classical Rabbinic exegesis, like Rabbinic Judaism itself, was not so much completely 'other' to, or apart from, Western culture as it was a marginal presence on its borders, a tradition that developed by drawing on Western categories and transforming them without becoming wholly absorbed by them .... No attempt will ever be sufficient that presents midrash and its hermeneutics in simple opposition to logocentrism, with the latter being characterized as a Greco-Roman or Christian development and the former as a Jewish one. To read midrash as a rewriting of Derrida, Jacques Lacan, or Edmond J abes is equally misguided. (Stern 1989:134) Stern's objection, like that of Rose, is that history is collapsed into an eternal tension between two opposing traditions-which dangerously falsifies both. Judaism has not simply been other to Christian Hellenism but rather inside and outside, not simply exiled from the kingdom but straddling that ambivalent line between the two. 9 Bauman (1991 a) demonstrates this ambivalenc e in relation to the Jew under modern conditions, just as Paul Gilroy does (1993) with regard to the formation of black intellectuals in the modern era. Indeed, deconstruction itself (in other areas) demonstrates the same ambivalence of so -called opposites. However, in this instance, the

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challenge to modernity presented by those who have celebrated 'the Jewish tradition' seems to be founded on a crude manicheanism. Not only does the opposition between Hebraism and Hellenism lead to essentialist definitions of both but, paradoxically, it tends to confirm the dichotomy between the two traditions constructed in the age of modernity. In employing an ethnic allegory to characterize the tension between order and disorder, reason and the resistance to reason, the self-constituted unified self and the heterogeneous self, the West of 'Hellenic Greece and Christian Rome' and its Qewish) other, this postmodern theory would appear to overlap uncomfortably with the ethnic allegory employed in the Enlightenment version of progress. Both seem to work from a paradigm in which the anxious struggle between, on the one hand, reason, philosophy and the law and, on the other hand, the rootless, the nomadic, the cosmopolitan, the unruly, the discordant and the excess, is characterized in ethnic terms. The opposition between the Aryan and the Semite constructed in the nineteenth century, theorized in France especially by the religious historian Ernest Renan to form the basis of modern racial thought, and which then led to the catastrophic consequences of the twentieth century, reappears in postmodern theory in inverted form. Postmodern theory's adoption of an ethnicized allegory for portraying the tension between self and other, the nation and its others, therefore appears to concur, in a paradoxical way, with the problematic discourse of the era of modernity in which ' the Jew' was cast, precisely, across that anxious fault-line between order and disorder, and for which real Jews suffered with their lives (cf. Cheyette 1996:296). 10 The judaizing of alterity in postmodern theory therefore reproduces the very binary terms which it critiques, but simply inverts the opposition so that what was formerly stigmatized is now celebrated. Jean-Claude Eslin (1990:117) questions the benefits of this manichean inversion: 'Must the contemporary presentation of European history now stigmatize not the Jew but the "Greek", the other actor in the partnership, and to close off all possible outlets to him so as finally to incur his wrath?' Taking issue with Lyotard's caricature of 'Christian Europe' (as Lyotard says, 'the whole social, political, religious and philosophical history of Christian Europe is evidence of a continuous enterprise, employing diverse methodsquestion, conversion, expulsion, censorship-to neutralize the message of the Jews and to banish the community of non-believers' 1990:115), Eslin hints at the dangers of this type of misrepresentation: 'Should we depict the Jews, in manichean fashion, as radically other

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to Europe and therefore place them outside modernity?' (Eslin 1990:117). The representation of women has, of course, also been down this path. The celebration of emotion (as opposed to reason), body (as opposed to mind), indecipherability (as opposed to clarity), difference (as opposed to uniformity), and so on, merely reproduces essentialist stereotypes but posits positive rather than negative images to the feminine (see, for example, Annie Leclerc's Parole de femme, 1974, and Marie Cardinal's Autrement dit, 1977). It is interesting to note the similarities between the judaizing and feminization of alterity- and especially the extent to which the celebration of both today could be seen as an inverted form of some of the classic anti-Semitic images of the 1930s, which made prolific use of the opposition between a virile, 'male' France and a feminized Jewish other (cf. Birnbaum 1988). In terms of the uncomfortable similarities between a postmodern philo-Semitism and a modern anti-Semitism, let us take for example the following statement by Lyotard: The Jews do not belong to 'the family' even though they have been 'resident', as one says, in Carpentras for more than a thousand years and in Prague, Budapest and the Rhineland for centuries. The Jews are not a nation. They do not speak their own language. They do not have roots in an essential nature like the European nations. Their source of origin is a book. (Lyotard 1990:114) The unsuspecting reader of these words could be forgiven for thinking that they were written by Drumont, Barn::s, Maurras, Daudet or any other of the anti-Semitic writers of the first decades of the twentieth century. It is the well-worn image of the wandering Jew who has no attachment to family, nation or language. Of course, Lyotard's use of 'the jew' here as a figure of non-fixity, diaspora and alterity differs profoundly from that of the anti-Semites mentioned above. Lyotard's purpose is to point up the impossibility and, most importantly, the violence of the modern project of fixing meaning and 'making the same', the Western metaphysical project of truth, reason and law, and the cultivation (in Bauman's terms, 1991a) of a well-ordered garden. ll Lyotard's aim is to break with the modern obsession with the unitary nature of the self and to make a permanent space for what is non recup era ble, sublime. The problem simply comes from giving this ambivalence the name 'jew', and thus valorizing what was previously deemed to be problematic.

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Alain Stoek! (1995) makes a similar point about the thought of the writer Maurice Blanchot, who was an enormously influential figure in the postmodern turn with regard to writing and representation. Stoek! describes Blanchot's thought as having evolved from a pre-war antiSemitism to a post-war philo-Semitism (largely through the influence of Georges Bataille) by simply rendering negatives-exile, exodus and speech (Ia parole) -as positives. Stoek! states that Blanchot's affirmation of the Jews is mainly the flip side of the reactionary's condemnation: if a Barn::s, or a disciple of Barres, could decry their rootlessness, a [post-war] Blanchot could affirm it. Now their rootlessness is positive, but the terms remain the same. (Stoek! 1995:135) 12 Here post-Holocaust allegories of 'the Jew' touch on much wider questions of modernity and postmodernity. For it could be said, more generally, that what was previously stigmatized and deemed subversive has been democratized and become the norm: difference is desirable, marginality has moved to the centre, hybridity and non-fixity are a sign of postmodern times. Scott Lash (Beck et al. 1994:144), using the terms 'cognitive reflexivity' and 'aesthetic reflexivity' to refer to modern and postmodern modes respectively (see Chapter 3), also demonstrates how the postmodern valorization of contingency, marginality and nomadism simply inverts the hierarchy of terms established in the age of modernity: 'Cognitive reflexivity posed the calculating subject versus contingency, and the conceptual versus the mimetic. Aesthetic reflexivity's renewal of this hierarchy, with the embrace of contingency and mimesis, remain arguably located in the same metaphysical universe.' We shall consider some of the consequences of this reversal elsewhere in this book. Let us just note here that the postmodern conditions leading to the celebration of difference do not automatically guarantee a protection of 'the other' from forces that would eradicate it; on the contrary, new conditions might well be as inhospitable to 'the other' as those in the modern era. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (1993) have raised a number of related questions in relation to postmodern philosophy's adoption of 'the Jew' as the site of 'the other'. First, the caricature of a Hellenic West, to which Hebraism is irredeemably other, suggests that real Jews were merely the passive victims of Christian Europe's constructions of 'the Jew'. As the Boyarins point out, this was the major problem with Sartre's conceptual framework in Rijlexions sur la question juive:

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Lyotard basically repeats Sartre's thesis about the production of the Jew by the anti-Semite. [He says] 'What is most real about real Jews is that Europe, in any case, does not know what to do with them: Christians demand their conversion; monarchs expel them; republics assimilate them; Nazis exterminate them.' But one might also add 'and philosophers allegorize them' and in doing so, they continue another particularly Christian practice with regard to uppercase Jews, one that begins with Paul. (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993:701) The Boyarins' objection here is that 'the Jew' as allegorized 'other' is presented, as in Sartre's text, as simply an object of the Christian gaze, simply someone else's representation rather than having any subject-status, agency or history of its own. (For a critique of Rijlexions sur fa question juive, see, for example, Grosz 1990, Kritzman 1995b, Suleiman 1995.) Second, and perhaps more important, in employing 'Jew' as a trope for alterity-including all real outsiders, strangers, Blacks, Arabs and real Jews-this use of 'the Jew' would seem to conflate all difference into an indistinguishable alterity and, in the process, eradicate the specificities of each group. Where are real Jews here, with a specific history, ask the Boyarins. They point out (1993:699) that although Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, is motivated by the desire to 'unwork' the complicity between philosophy and twentieth-century violence, it is possible that 'his rhetoric is complicit in perpetuating the cultural annihilation of the Jew'. Within the thought of philosophers like Nancy, they continue, there 'lies a blindness to the particularity of Jewish difference that is itself part of a relentless penchant for allegorizing all "difference" into a univocal discourse'. 'The Jew', then, simply becomes the figure (or trope) employed to define a new universalism, the reified marker of all resistance to rootedness, fixity and closure-the postmodern nomad par excellence. The problem of defining collectivities between this infinite dispersal of identity and its rootedness within a specific history is characteristic of the postmodern dilemma.

Jews and poets

Postmodern philosophy's adoption of 'Auschwitz' as an allegory of the tragic decline of the West and 'the Jew' as victim of and witness to this tragedy is also an allegory of the demise of Western forms of

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25

representation. These (allegorical) 'Jews' bear witness not only to the absurdity of the modern political process of assimilation (uniformity and the reduction to the same) but also to the impossibility of the broader modern philosophical and cultural project of classification and representation of the real. They designate the 'unnameable', what is lacking in all representation, what cannot be spoken- since all representation is a form of absence from a source-the point at which language meets silence. In other words, 'the Jew' and 'Auschwitz' stand as a sign of the modernist challenge to referential realism. In Le Differend, Lyotard outlines clearly this interpretation of 'Auschwitz': The 'Auschwitz' model designates an 'experience' of language which questions all speculative discourse. Such discourse can no longer function 'after Auschwitz'. 'Auschwitz' is a name which denies the process of speculative thought. It is therefore not a name in the Hegelian sense, that is, a figure of memory which guarantees the fixity of the referent and its meanings even when the spirit has destroyed its outer signs. It is a name with no speculative 'name', irrecuperable in terms of a concept. (Lyotard 1983:133) Lyotard's approach (and that of Jacques Derrida) is here placed explicitly in an anti-representational line which would include Mallarme and Blanchot (among others) but which then ethnicizes the silence / absence at the heart of representation by associating it with the genocide of Jews at Auschwitz. The silence beyond language is designated by the anti-nominalist name Jew', while Auschwitz becomes the present absence, that which lies behind all human discourse, whose traces (for that is all we have) we are obliged to interrogate. Blanchot extends Adorno's stricture on the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz into one on the impossibility of narrative: 'I would suggest that there can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz' (Apres-coup, Minuit, 1983, p. 98). In L'Ecriture du desastre (1980), he equates the disaster of Auschwitz with the disaster of meaning, for Auschwitz is the ultimate sign of the impossibility of language to speak the truth: 'This unknown name is beyond naming. The Holocaust, the absolute event of History, historically dated, this consuming furnace in which History was destroyed, is also the moment at which meaning was extinguished' (p. 80). Blanchot's 'Holocaust' is the absence inevitably present in all projects of knowing, writing and being. Lyotard (1988b: 83- 84) extends the allegory by saying of 'Jews': 'They continue to bear witness, "after Auschwitz", to the impossibility for art and writing to bear witness to the Other.'

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In being recruited for the anti-representational argument, these jews' rejoin Roland Barthes' 'scriptible' or Julia Kristeva's 'semiotic' as other to institutionalized readings of texts and to the symbolic order. They become equated with the process of writing itself-that which bears witness to the perpetual displacement of meaning and the subversion of all forms of closure. This interpretation of 'the Jew' mirrors the contemporary shifts in focus from the perpetrators of violence to its victims/witnesses, from the voice of authority to the voice of 'the other', and from the (hi)story told to the problematic nature of telling, so that language itself becomes the real (anti-)hero of the text. We do not need to rehearse the more general debate on poststructuralism here (which has been amply discussed elsewhere). What is more significant for our present discussion is the very use of jew' and 'Auschwitz' for this purpose. We might describe this as a process of judaizing the site of 'the other' in an allegorical critique of Western forms of representation. 'Auschwitz' is the event which cannot be written Gust as Talmudic tradition proscribes all representations of God) but must always be written about so as never to be forgotten. Lyotard says, in Heidegger et 'les juifs' (1988b:50), 'to represent ''Auschwitz'' in images and in words is a way of forgetting', yet the imperative is nevertheless, as the philosopher Sarah Kofman was tragically aware, 'to write endlessly about writing about ''Auschwitz'', in order not to forget what happened at ''Auschwitz'" (Marks 1995:41; see also the same problems surrounding the question of 'witnessing' the Holocaust discussed in Felman 1990 and 'La parole centre l' extermination', Le Monde des livres) 25 February 1994). Hence the Jew's condition, and especially the Jew's specific link with the Holocaust, is generalized to encompass the whole of humanity (we are all survivors of Auschwitz, according to Blanchot) and the very process of writing itself. The Jew is the witness of loss and absence and doomed to write and rewrite that message-which is precisely the essence of writing. The Jew is the poet/witness. Alan Stoek! (1995:136) discusses this appropriation of Jewishness in the work of Maurice Blanchot. He observes that, for Blanchot, Jews "'bear witness", and it is their internal exile, so to speak, along with their word, that communicates to us a state of "distance which defies the possibility of simple unification-through-communication"'. Writing after Auschwitz is essentially jewish' in that it defies the Western utilitarian tradition of a transcendent sense and functions as perpetual displacement of truth and meaning. As Stoek! (1995:135) again says of Blanchot's treatment of the Jewish question, 'the Jews are, in effect, exemplary in that they "bear witness" to a relation that itself is not specifically Jewish'. The Jew becomes emblematic of this wider lesson. This is mimicked in

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Derrida's Circumfession (in Bennington and Derrida 1990), as Lawrence Kritzman observes:

In effect, the alterity that the Jew represents for Derrida engages the figure of the writer in a quest without closure, in an endless pursuit of the 'other in me' which itself re-turns the possibility of revelation .... Jewishness becomes a somewhat precarious enterprise as it enters the realm of undecidability. (Kritzman 1995b:115) Derrida had already traced this correspondence between the Jew and writing in the work of the poet Edmond Jabes ('Edmond Jabes et la question du livre', Derrida 1967:99-116), for whom 'the difficulty of being a Jew coincides with the difficulty of writing; for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same depletion' (from Le Livre des questions) 1963, cited in Bauman 1991a:157) Y Bauman poses the essential questions about this correspondence, again invoking the example of Jabes: Why do Jewishness and the universally human search each other out, define each other, blend? Why is it that Tsvetayeva, Borges, eelan, Joyce, trying to capture that void, that no-essence that is the first abode and the last retreat of universality, cannot but find the Jew in their net? ('First I thought I was a writer. Then I realized I was a Jew. Then I no longer distinguished the writer in me from the Jew because one and the other are only the torment of an ancient word,' confessed Edmond Jabes. Elsewhere he admits that the Jew is 'the figure of exile, errancy, strangeness and separation, condition that is that of the writer as well' (Le SouPron) Ie desert) Gallimard, 1978, p. 85)). (Bauman 1991a:191) This amalgamation of the condition of the Jew and the act of writing raises the same questions that we noted in the previous section regarding the amalgamation of 'the Jew' and the more general critique of Western rationality-for it is indeed part of the same logic. On one level, by transforming 'the Jew' into an allegory for a process which, in itself, has nothing to do with J ewishness (namely the process of writing), and by generalizing Jewish experience (or at least a particular version of it) into a universal truth, this theory is in danger of effacing any sense of Jewish specificity. Writing is 'Hebraized' while, on the other hand, the de particularized 'Jew' is thoroughly secularized.

28

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In a sense, this amounts to the ultimate form of assimilation of the Jew to a 'higher' cause. This is ironic-to say the least-given the professed desire of such theory to refuse to trap 'the other' within the oppressive logic of sameness and difference, and to return otherness to 'the other'. The universalizing of the Jew in this way moves perilously close, as Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (1993) argue, to eradicating the Jew all over again. On a more general level, if the Jewish experience of the Holocaust becomes an allegory for the limits of language (that is, the impossibility of language to speak the truth) and the irreducibility of 'the other', then the Holocaust is detached from its context in history and politics and relocated within the realm of aesthetics. Elaine Marks (1995:36) suggests that this reading of the Holocaust transforms 'the historicalsocial-ethical question of the extermination of the Jews into a philosophical-poetical-linguistic question of presence and absence'. The density of history is collapsed into the flat and immediate surface of story (narrative) beyond which language cannot go; experience recedes in favour of simulacra whose fate is to gesture obliquely towards that which cannot be spoken. There is a further irony here in that Adorno's warning against the aestheticization of the Holocaust ('to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric') ends up as a way of aestheticizing it-in terms of unspeakable and apocalyptic violence or as pure event, the point at which the end of history meets the end of philosophy (cf. Rose 1993:257). Michael Bernstein (1998:8) puts this paradox most clearly: 'To insist that the Shoah embodies some ultimate negative truth may represent the last, cunningly disguised bid of philosophical discourse to subject the multiplicity and heterogeneity of human experience to a single, all-encompassing standard.' Blanchot's appropriation of the Holocaust (1980:80) would appear to confirm this paradoxical aestheticization (and hence reduction) of that which is beyond all aestheticizing and beyond all forms of reductionism: 'How should we maintain [a memory of the Holocaust] if not through thought; yet how should we construct a thought which could capture that event in which everything was lost, including "appropriating" thought?' Does the deconstructionist use of 'Jew' and 'Auschwitz' therefore turn out to be another method of 'dislocating the memory of the Shoah from its past' (Kritzman 1995a:6), obscuring the specificity of the Holocaust, and, ultimately, recruiting the Jew yet again for the purpose of a universal truth?

In the shado]}) of the Holocaust

29

History, memory, representation It is, of course, here that the discussion of the Holocaust meets the more general postmodern textualization of history and the problems of memorializing the past. Whatever concepts one employs for defining the distinction between history and memory (the historian Fran<.;:ois Bedarida, for example, maintains that their trajectories are different, for 'the objective of memory is fidelity, whilst the objective of history is truth' 1993:7), their common grounding in language and representation inevitably blurs the distinctions. Lyotard designates 'Auschwitz' as the end of the modern version of history in which language could recuperate reality through an expression of 'facts', and the dawning of an age in which the limits of language are to the fore: The historian must henceforward break with the accepted hegemony of the cognitive linguistic regime governing history and be bold enough to pursue a different regime according to what cannot be presented within a cognitive framework. All reality is subject to this exigency insofar as any reality is composed of an unknown number of possible meanings. In this sense, Auschwitz is the most real of realities. Its name defines that space in which the very competence of historical knowledge is rendered problematic. (1983:92) The ' end of history', in this sense, means the inevitable recognition of the interconnections between historical event and the spoken or written memories of that event. The description by the historian Pierre Nora of the difference between the 'old' and 'new' historian highlights this evolution: The traditional historian ... fills in the gap which separates us from the past. He makes the past speak to us. He is, at one and the same time, notary and prophet. The new historian, on the other hand, is perfectly well aware that he is irrevocably cut off from the past. His task is simply to reconstruct the representation of the past. He has become intermediary and interpreter. ('Un entretien avec Pierre Nora', Le Monde, 29 November 1994)

In his enormous multi-volume enterprise entitled Les Lieux de memoire (1984), Nora recognizes the fact that the contemporary obsession with the 'sites' of memory today marks, paradoxically, the unriveting of those

30

Facing Pos/modernity

links which moulded past, present and future into historical time, and the death of the historical mission of the nation which depended on this version of time. Reflecting on Nora's expose of this 'shattering of temporality', Mongin (1993:104) observes: 'The present, which has become more and more "historiographical" and le ss and le ss "historical", is reflected within a memory which has become more and more cumbersome.' Mongin had already remarked on the problems raised by this new historiography founded on memory in the context of 'speaking' the Holocaust: The 'historiographical' interrogation underpinning a certain interpretation of Nazism echoes the interrogation brought to bear on the memory of the Shoah: how should Nazism be interpreted historically? But also how should we speak of and remember the Shoah? These two different questions are in effect the same question for they both ask what 'narration' is possible to constitute the narrative of a crime whose specificity and uniqueness (Eighenheit) 'paralyses' the historian as much as the writer. (Mongin 1988:85) These difficult questions are explored in a fascinating and immensely profound way in Claude Lanzmann's monumental film on the Holocaust, Shoah. Through the apparently simple device of interviews between the director and survivors and witnesses of and accomplices to the Holocaust, Lanzmann traces the interconnections between memory, history and speech while, at the same time, dramatizing his own role in pursuit of this lost disaster. It is not, as Lanzmann has said, a documentary, but a work of art as much about memory and narration as history itself (or rather the inevitable interconnections between all three processes). As Todorov (1994:288) has observed, 'the distance between past and present is abolished. Lanzmann does not film the past, which is impossible (no archival material is used in Shoah), but the way in which we remember-now.' The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet has suggested that underlying Lanzmann's project in Shoah is the problem faced by all historians today: How to bring to history the teaching of Marcel Proust, the search for lost time as time lost and recovered at the same time. [In Shoah] we are presented with a single document where everything depends on the questions it asks today of its witnesses and on the answers it receives .. .. Between time lost and time recovered there is the work of art and the test which Shoah sets for the historian is his obligation to be both a scientist and an artist at one and the same time. Without

In the shado]}) of the Holocaust

31

this dual function in mind, the historian irremediably loses a fraction of that truth which he pursues. (Vidal-Naquet 1990:208)

Shoah, as Michel Deguy says (1990:36), is a work which is made in the spirit of Adorno's injunction on the impossibility of poetry and representation after Auschwitz. Modernism's challenge to representational realism has now become the inescapable truth of history. Vidal-Naquet's reference to Proust underlines this fact, for it highlights the dilemma of the contemporary historian who can no longer be unaware of the problematic nature of recording the past. The historian's dilemma and that of the writer are the same, for both are subject to the present constraints of language and narrative (see especially the works of Hayden White). The textualization of history is also the conflation of the past event and the present of writing, the historian and the writer-all of which are part of the more general process of the flattening of history noted above (which, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is dependent on the spatialization of time). Also with Lanzmann's film in mind, Mongin shows how attempts to record the Shoah relate directly to the contemporary feeling of 'an exhaustion of the historical experience itself': The Shoah poses the question of the crisis of history and of the memory that one is obliged to privilege to remember the dead. This is why the suspicion which weighs on the experience itself gives rise to an interrogation of the very act of 'memorializing', that is our ability to make links with the past and, more importantly, with the dead whose deaths passed unnoticed. (Mongin 1994a:80) Lyotard's 'Auschwitz' (1983:145 -146) is precisely the problematization of experience itself: '''Auschwitz'' cannot have a speculative name because it is the name of a para-experience or even of the destruction of experience.' For Mongin (1991 :191), Lanzmann's Shoah inserts the Shoah and ' the Jewish question' at the heart of the whole modern enterprise, since the problems of recalling the catastrophe are intricately connected with the breakdown of Western reason: 'It is the failure of European political reason which is at the heart of these images of memory and the commemoration of the dead.' The invasion of the problems of 'subjective' memory into the field of 'objective' history, and of representation into the field of 'experience'

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is therefore akin to the judaizing of Western scientific method, given the dichotomy (for some) between a Judaism which values memory over history ('Zakhor') and a Christianity which has the opposite values. In the words of Fran<.;:ois Bedarida (1993:8-9) 'the Christian tradition has been relentless in its desire to privilege history over memory, whilst the Jewish tradition, until quite recently, privileged and even exaggerated memory to the detriment of history'. In this sense the Shoah marks the transformation of the confident modern version of history into our contemporary scepticism, 'when the figures of evil and memory have replaced those of good and the Utopian imagination' (Mongin 1991:192).14 For Lyotard, this understanding of the Shoah signals the end of the project of modernity, while for the German political philosopher Jurgen Habermas (1996) it signals the need for the completion of the modern project in the light of the failure of instrumentalist rationality (cf. Mongin 1994a:69-77). Mongin (1991: 192) concludes that 'history has lost its rhythm, it is running down .. .and the final glorious dream is in the process of becoming a bad memory'. How to discuss the Holocaust in the light of the contemporary problematization of truth, objectivity and reality, and the conflation of history, memory and language? How to disentangle the Holocaust from the mass of images and words about the Holocaust now that the umbilical cord linking past to present has been cut and we appear to be adrift in a sea of simulacra? These are some of the important questions raised in recent years after two decades of relative silence in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore, in an advanced information society (Ia societe de communication) in which, as Mongin (1993:105) observes, we are both plunged into an 'autistic' present which undermines 'the idea of history' and beset by 'a cult of memory', how do we distinguish 'genuine' information from 'false' disinformation? The recording of the past in a postmodern age opens up a space in which, paradoxically, the 'reality' of the Holocaust is at once both more 'present' and direct (the spectator fused with the event as if beyond all forms of mediation) and more distant (a moment irrevocably lost in time and inevitably refracted through the prism of present consciousness and the intertextual web of language and image).1 5 The focus on the problematic nature of representing the Holocaust through language, and the transformation of the density of 'history' and 'reality' into the flat surface of the present (detaching us from a fixed version of the past) provide the context within which contemporary revisionist versions of the Holocaust can flourish. On the one hand, our sense of horror has been weakened due to overexposure to images of violence. Following Jean Baudrillard's writings

In the shado]}) of the Holocaust

33

on the nature of evil, Geoffrey Hartman refers to the 'compassion fatigue' and accompanying feeling of 'unreality' that beset us today: Baudrillard, who extends Benjamin's insight on how technology invades sensibility, suggests that the later negationist obsession with challenging the historical reality of the Holocaust is only another expression of our growing sense of the unreality of the past. This unreality fuses our horror of the Holocaust with an incredulity that comes from the awareness that we now live more and more among simulacra. (Hartman 1995:21)

In a climate of simulacra and pure relativism, negationism is simply one image of the past among others. On the other hand (and as we noted earlier in this chapter) deconstruction's challenge to binary oppositions has subverted the manichean antithesis between democracy and dictatorship, good and evil, and confuses the previously clear-cut delineation of perpetrators and victims. The indictment of the West and modernity in general in terms of their involvement in the Holocaust therefore calls into question the neat distinction between Nazism (as the quintessential evil) and the Western democracies (as upholders of the moral order). Through what Henri Rousso (1987) has described as the 'Vichy syndrome', France has been profoundly divided in recent years over the question of the relationship between fascism and democracy. The repressed connections between republicanism and fascism have returned with a vengeance (not least in the figure of Fran<.;:ois Mitterrand). In De l'esprit, Jacques Derrida discusses the inevitable 'contaminations' traversing all artificial demarcations established in Western philosophy, rendering problematic those discourses which would wish to see Nazism as a species alien to Western forms of thought: Nazism was not born in the desert. We know this but it must be constantly repeated. And even if it had sprouted like a mushroom, far from any desert, in the silence of a European forest, it would only have been able to do so under the shade of tall trees, in the shelter of their silence and their indifference, rooted in the same soiL . . . They would bear the names of religions, philosophies, political regimes, economic structures, religious or academic institutions. In short, they would be what we confusingly call 'culture' or 'the world of the spirit'. (Derrida 1987:179)

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Lyotard (1988a:83) also remarks on the interconnections and 'contaminati ons' between Nazism and Western forms of liberal democracy. Capitali sm, he suggests, 'keeps house with despotism, as we can see with Nazism'. Derrida and Lyotard both challenge us to consider our own position when rushing to judge others, and ask us provocatively how we can so easily condemn Nazism without realizing the complicity of the West. Lyotard, for example, seems to equate republican assimilation and Nazi genocide as if there was little to choose between them in terms of their respective forms of violence to 'the other'. The 'will of the people' guiding the reign of Terror of the French Revolution and the spirit of the Volk underpinning Nazi genocide might not be identical but neither are they opposites. The mythology constructed around the Volk could only flourish because the ground had already been prepared by 'democratic' thinking: Nazism replaced the idea of the citizen wi th the name 'Aryan'. It founded its legitimacy on the myths of the Northern race and abandoned the modern horizon of cosmopolitanism. It succeeded because it implanted within the idea of the sovereignty of the people, 'democratically' in the Kantian sense, a desire for a 'return to origins' which could only be satisfied by myth. Nazism provided 'the people' with the names and narratives which allowed it to identify exclusively with German heroes and to heal the wounds produced by defeat and crisis. (Lyotard 1988a:68) 16 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1990:312) also blur the dividing line between Nazism and democracy when they state that Nazi mythmaking 'belongs profoundly to the character of the West in general, and more precisely, to the fundamental tendency of the subject) in the metaphysical sense of the word'. The challenge to the oppositions between universalism and particularism, assimilation and difference, democracy and totalitarian rule, undercuts the manichean moral universe employed to legitimize the West. This theoretically sensible position only poses problems when the questions of responsibility, guilt and justice are pursued to their logical extreme. As Gillian Rose (1993:257) has pointed out, the danger of making the Holocaust the benchmark for the limits of modernity, ' the measure of history as such, of truth as such, of reason as such', is that it removes the Holocaust from the realm of human action and opens the way for more thoroughgoing revisions of Nazi genocide.

In the shado ]}} of the H olocaust

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These problems were highlighted at the time of the Paul de Man affair. When it was revealed that the celebrated literary critic had written for a collaborationist and anti-Semitic paper during the war, Derrida was accused of casuistry (and worse) in defending de Man according to the type of argument outlined above. 17 Shoshana Felman adopted a typically Derridean stance in her own defence of de Man: The easy judgments made on de Man's historical misjudgments provide not insight but relief: in passing judgment on de Man, we distance and disown his dangerous closeness to us, in an attempt to distance history, the Holocaust, as past, his past, which, as such, remains foreign and exterior to our present. We blind ourselves to the historical reality of that past by reducing its obscurity to a paradigm of readability-an easily intelligible and safely remote manichean allegory of good and evil. .. de Man was 'Nazi': in denouncing him as one of 'them', we believe we place ourselves in a different zone of ethics and temporality; 'we' as opposed to 'they', are on the right side of history-a side untouched, untainted by the evil of the Holocaust. (Felman 1989:706) But virtually the same argument as Felman's was subsequently used by Jacques Verges in his defence of Klaus Barbie, the 'butcher of Lyon' at the time of Germany's occupation of France during the Second World War. At the time of the Barbie trial, Simone Weil condemned this confusion of right and wrong, which she claimed constituted a 'banalization of the Holocaust' (quoted in Chaumont 1994:80).18 Le Pen, too, is particularly adept at equating all sorts of 'catastrophes' (Islam, Aids, the Holocaust, and so on), a tactic which has the same effect of reducing everything to the same and consequently downgrading the particular value of anything. Mongin observes that this leaves us with an impossible choice: If the world is composed of victims and there is no difference between different crimes, the risk that we run is to lock ourselves into a stark alternative: either the most extreme of crimes is downgraded or, on the other hand, it becomes reified .... And if we therefore oscillate between a 'dumbing down' and a reification of evil, we thereby lose our capacity to perceive any gradation in crimes, and hence our capacity to judge. (Mongin 1991 :193) 19

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A further example of this less overt postmodern revisionism (which also demonstrates the revisionist potential of the deconstructionist argument, cf. Marks 1996:13-20) can be seen in the famous Historikerstreit (querelle des historiens or 'historians' debate') in Germany. The comparative approach of Ernst Nolte was criticized not only because it placed Soviet practices of extermination alongside those of the Nazis (and therefore challenged the uniqueness of Nazi genocide) but also because, in so doing, it establishes a 'slippage in meaning' which exonerates Germany from the sole responsibility for the atrocities of the war (Bedarida 1997:221). Nolte's approach therefore had a specific function in the present: it allowed Germans to reappropriate their past by providing them with the gratifying knowledge that their history (Nazism) was really no worse than other forms of barbarism (see Friedlander 1987 and Dominick La Capra's argument in Friedlander, ed., 1992). From the Pandora's box of postmodern textuality, the challenge to binary oppositions and the demise of history comes an assortment of reappraisals of the past with unpredictable political and moral consequences. Can French postmodern philosophy's challenge to modernity and objectivity be said to collude with negationist statements on the Holocaust? Does the poststructuralist refusal to equate the word with the truth in realist fashion reproduce the Nazis' deliberate camouflage of the truth?20 Conan and Lindenberg wonder whether the use of the word 'Shoah' in the 1980s might itself be an indication of an implicit negationism: To name this monstrous event 'Shoah' .. .is possibly symptomatic of a slippage (which certain commentators have theorized) towards the abdication of reason in the face of the Unfathomable and the Indescribable or Unbearable. This manoeuvre constitutes the reverse side of negationism since it removes the event from any history which would attempt to 'explain' it. (Conan and Lindenberg 1992:15) Elaine Marks asks a similar question: Were the Nazis poststructuralists and deconstructors avant fa fettre in their desire 'never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action being taken'? Or, more worrisome still, were and are the Heideggerians and poststructuralists, as has been asserted in France and the United States during the recent debates concerning the politics and the philosophical and/or literary theories of

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Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, engaged in an intellectual enterprise that involves inherently dangerous modes of thought? (Marks 1995:37-38) However, rather than equate poststructuralism and deconstruction with Nazism-which is as rash a judgement as the unproblematic conflation of democracy and Nazism under the broad banner of 'modernity' -we should perhaps be aware of both the similarities and differences between these so-called 'opposites'. Todorov adopts a more nuanced perspective on this question: I have no sympathy with those who view Auschwitz as the inevitable end-point, the essential truth unfolded, the scarcely more extreme manifestation of our modernity. If the term 'modernity' can cover such different realities as democracy and totalitarianism, then I doubt its usefulness as a concept. However, precisely because it is the extreme limit of modernity .. . totalitarianism can teach us much about democracy. (Todorov 1994:307) 21 Without collapsing all differences into a monolithic concept of modernity and the West (which leads precisely to the sort of problems raised above) we should nevertheless be responsive to the question of 'contamination' between so-called 'opposites' announced in postmodern philosophy. The break with binary oppositions and the demise of a transcendent truth do indeed signal a more complex and messy value system, and a problematization of history. Furthermore, the connections between modernity, Jews and the disaster of the Holocaust cannot be overlooked if a new ethics is to emerge beyond totalizing systems of thought and political practice (whatever the problems might be of allegorizing 'Auschwitz' and 'the Jew' for this purpose). We can no longer live with the same Utopian illusions that guided a modernity founded on reducing 'the other' to the same; nor can we be unaware of the sense of loss, absence and exile from an original source or transcendent meaning which underpins all our actions and our language. We are condemned to a life devoid of the certainty of the past and constrained within the walls of our own images of experience. In one sense, this is a tragic vision for, as Olivier Mongin observes, being cut off from the past signifies the demise of the modern concept of 'Man': This idea of a possible loss of a link with the past inevitably weighs heavily on our conception of history and destroys the

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possibility of historical experience. If this link is well and truly broken, then, by the same token, humanity is in crisis. (Mongin 1994a:81) But it is also a necessary prerequisite for the creation of any new being - less hubristic and intimately acquainted with contingency. Living with uncertainty and with no fixed idea of history and progress is a double-edged sword. 22

New ethics, new dangers The contemporary rediscovery of the Holocaust therefore brings with it both new chances and new dangers. The passage from relative silence about the Holocaust to a frenzy of talking may have shattered past taboos and brought to the surface what was formerly repressed, but the plurality of voices now raised may not, for all that, have provided a cure. As Todorov has pointed out (1998:13) 'memory is no longer threatened by the suppression of information but by its overabundance'. The constant stream of Holocaust-talk of recent years might simply have buried the Holocaust once again beneath a plethora of interpretations. Geoffrey Hartman (1995:15) suggests that 'this hyperknowledge about both perpetrators and victims, this wish to disclose and expose everything, may be no more remedial than the conspiracy of silence that used to exist'. In particular, the mobilization of 'Auschwitz' for the cause of the wider indictment of modernity might be the path towards the contemporary 'banalization of the Holocaust' rather than towards a more profound understanding of its import. 'Auschwitz' as the end of history and the end of philosophy opens up the space for a resurgent revisionism dressed up in the clothes of a 'respectable' relativism. It would therefore be premature and foolhardy to celebrate unequivocally the post-Holocaust and postmodern era as a new dawn. If we are all (allegorical) 'Jews' today-all non-rooted, diasporic, nomadic and cosmopolitan-it does not necessarily follow that we have entered a realm of new freedoms and new ethics for all beyond the constraints of modern concepts of self and other. If the particular state of the Jew under modern conditions has become the general state of us all under postmodern conditions (with the sole difference that stigmatization of difference has now given way to celebration of it) then this might be a cause for concern as much as rejoicing. In the following chapters we will explore the consequences of this process of

In the shado]}) of the Holocaust

39

democratization of marginality, not the least of which is the commodification of difference, hybridity and cosmopolitanism. However, it would be equally foolhardy to dismiss the possibilities on offer now that we have seen through the Utopian illusions of modernity and can reflect on modernity's hubris. Living in the shadow of the Holocaust can open the door to another way of viewing 'the other', founded on the recognition of the absence of totality in the self and the parallel recognition of (and responsibility for) this absence in others. Is this aJewish ethics as opposed to the ethics of 'the Christian West', or is such a formulation a simplification of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem (Rose 1993)? Whatever the answer to this question, it is certainly a vision of otherness which is not confined within modernity's binary straitjacket of same/other, uniformity/ irredeemable difference. Yet any new ethics needs a new politics to make such a vision a reality. Unfortunately, postmodern life is not always conducive to the realization of either.

2

New racisms

Modern 'logics' of racism Although the term 'racism' was not formally invented until the interwar period, the practice was a product of modern social structures and modern ideas which pre-dated the 1930s. In his path-breaking analysis of racism and anti-racism of the modern era, Pierre-Andre Taguieff (1988a) outlines two major discourses of racism. The first was linked to the universalizing and civilizing mission of the modern nation-state which found its major forms of expression in colonialism abroad and assimilationist social engineering at home. This was a racism that aimed at eradicating the difference of 'the other' by reducing 'the other' to the same. The second was a particularist form of racism founded on the concept of the essential and absolute differences between groups. This was a racism that aimed at excluding 'the other'. In Taguieff's terms, the first is 'heterophobic', 'mixophilic' and inferiorizes the other, the second is 'heterophilic', 'mixophobic' and differentiates 'the other' (for a more detailed discussion of these terms, see Silverman 1992). In his introduction to a recent collection entitled Racisme et modernite) Michel Wieviorka adopts the same terms as Taguieff (Wieviorka 1993a). However, Wieviorka suggests that it is more useful to see these discourses as two 'logics' of racism which are not mutually exclusive but are frequently co-present in different forms of racist behaviour and action (cf. Wieviorka 1991 and 1994, and Lapeyronnie 1993). Zygmunt Bauman (1993:163-165) uses the terms employed by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques (1955) to define the same strategies: anthropophagism is the cannibalistic and ingestionist racism of assimilation, and anthropoemism is the expulsion of 'the other' or 'vomiting out' racism of apartheid or (in its genocidal form) Nazism. The two broad types correspond to universalistic and particularistic modes respectively.

NCiP

racisms

41

In a general sense, these two strategies or 'logics' define the modern paradigm for apprehending difference. Difference was a problem, or rather a task: it had either to be fixed for ever or removed completely. On the one hand, new scientific method used skull sizes (and other equally 'reliable' evidence) to divide the human race into a hierarchy of races, thus grounding the difference of 'the other' in the immutable laws of nature. On the other hand, difference could (indeed must) be transcended in order to bring about the Utopian society of equals. The first saw difference as an essential characteristic of humanity; the second saw difference as an irritant, a stain, a sign of parochialism, backwardness and tradition which needed to be removed in the name of civilization, enlightenment and progress. Here we have the classic dichotomy of the modern period between the deterministic idea of the Volk and the voluntarist concept of the free individual: that is, between biological essentialism and assimilationist rationalism. But Wieviorka's warning not to see the two 'logics' of racism as mutually exclusive is an important corrective to Taguieff's schema. What was frequently presented as a choice between opposites (and is often presented in the same way today) was, in effect, a far more fluid relationship between universalism and particularism, assimilation and difference, ingestion and expulsion of 'the other'. Tzvetan Todorov's wide-ranging appraisal of some of the great French thinkers of the modern period (from Montesquieu and Rousseau to Bard~s and Peguy) in his book Nous et les autres (1989) highlights the ambivalence of the opposition between the rational belief in the perfectibility of 'Man', on the one hand, and the biological determinism of human essences, on the other. Is it possible to say with any certainty that the racialized nationalism and anti-Semitism of Maurice Barn::s at the end of the nineteenth century, based on the volkisch principles of soil and blood as determinants of belonging to the community, were any more instrumental in suppressing the claims of 'the other' than Michelet's patriotic nationalism, based on the Enlightenment principles of reason and truth, whose ideology underpinned Jules Ferry's confident ' civilizing' colonialism of the 1880s (see Girardet 1972)? The dividing line between universalists and relativists is sometimes rather blurred when viewed from the standpoint of their treatment of 'the other'. The modern project of assimilation is a good case in point. Despite its continual flirtation with racial thinking through the second part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, France, as we know, officially chose the course of assimilation, based primarily (although not exclusively) on the jus soli (droit du sol). Assimilation viewed identity as pliable and transformable. It gave modern society its ultimate

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rationale: to undertake a civilizing mission to nurture a higher form of humanity. The dream was to make all the same, irrespective of origin, race, religion or creed: uniformity in the name of equality. The institution which would put this mission into practice was the nation-state. Nation, state and culture would be fused indissolubly to form 'the single and indivisible Republic (la republique une et indivisible)'. The problem was that some differences turned out to be particularly resistant to change. Some ' peasants' needed a fair degree of disciplining to transform them into 'Frenchmen' (Foucault 1976, Weber 1976). Indeed, there were even those who were so backward that no amount of cajoling and coercion could bring them into the realm of light. What is more, even those who made the effort, who shed all signs of their parochial garb and jettisoned all that baggage in the name of progress, could always be suspected of harbouring secret attachments to their origins. Jews were the example par excellence of this double-bind (cf. Bauman 1991a). They were in fact mimics or impostors, not exactly the real thing. Here, of course, the binary line between racial and assimilationist thinking, between the essential and transformable nature of identity, and between the so-called ethnic and political models of the nation which arose from this dichotomy ('French' and 'German' respectively) appears less clear. Is it the droit du sol which underpins this perspective or the racialized droit du sang (jus sanguinis)? The notion of a manichean opposition between a French universalist and German particularist model can only be maintained if the 'contaminations' between the two are rigidly policed, and troubling interferences (like French antiSemitism, Vichy racial policy, and so on) are classified as antirepublican and Germanic in origin (see Sternhell 1983). As we noted in Chapter 1, this type of dichotomy simply effaces the ambivalence of (and therefore interconnections between) both terms. As Gil Delannoi remarks, 'Rousseau's model of the nation is not as far removed from Herder's model as one might think' (1994:90). Elsewhere I have attempted to show how the seminal text eulogized by defenders of the republican political model of the nation-'What is a nation? (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?)' delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 by Renan-demonstrates, in fact, a constant slippage between a determinist essentialism and a rationalist voluntarism in terms of a definition of the nation (Silverman 1992:20-24). The slippage is obscured especially by the use of the word 'culture', for Renan can both reject the criterion of 'race' as the foundation of the nation and yet introduce an equally essentialist definition (through the back door, so to speak) by transposing questions of biology on

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to questions of language, history and psychology. Renan can thus look both ways at the same time: the individual is at once (pre)determined by his/her membership of a collectivity with a past comprising specific traditions and customs and free to associate with others according to his / her own rational choices. This Janus-like quality makes Renan's text classically modern, for it is caught between past and future, remembering and forgetting, the conflicting paradigms of fixing and changing 'the other', categorizing 'the other' in immutable terms and transforming otherness into the same.! At a deeper level than the conventional (and often manichean) oppositions between rationalism and determinism, Lumieres and romanticism, universalism and particularism, and assimilation and difference, there is therefore an ambivalent attitude towards otherness which characterizes the modern mind. In one sense, the two 'logics' outlined above converge in terms of their quest for a unitary self. Assimilation seeks to fix 'the other' just as much as racial determinism. The psychoanalyst and writer Daniel Sibony (1988:118) has defined the assimilationist project in the following terms: 'Assimilation means making the same .. .either assimilating oneself to the other or assimilating the other to oneself, dissolving the other in oneself or dissolving oneself in the other.' The dissolution of 'the other' and the immutable fixing of ' the other' both deny the unsettling, unnameable and irrecuperable difference of 'the other': 'There is always a left-over which cannot be recuperated. Whether one believes that one can master it or not, it is always there (Sibony 1988:118). Elsewhere Sibony (1997:36) suggests that the two 'logics' of racism are really one and the same: 'The two manoeuvres of the "racist" -designating the other as inferior or as different (therefore fixing him in his difference) -is really one single logic.' He maintains that 'assimilation is only possible in conjunction with its opposite, namely the most extreme form of differentiation' (1997 :142). Ingestion and expulsion of 'the other' could therefore be seen as two sides of the same process of fixing the boundaries of the self in relation to 'the other', that same Utopian dream of ordering the world according to the new scientific 'evidence' concerning humanity. Both contained the seeds of a violence to 'the other' which, when allowed to flourish fully through a developing industrial and bureaucratic complex, resulted in apocalyptic violence (d. Bauman 1988). It is precisely these seeds that anti-humanist philosophy of the post-war period has attempted to uproot (see Chapter 1). It is not my intention here to discuss racism and modernity exhaustively (see, for example, Wieviorka (ed.) 1993; Rattansi 1994) but simply to provide the context for considering forms of racism in

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France today. The 'logics' of modern racism are a product of that brief period in the history of 'Man' in which the confident and proselytizing message of Western patriarchal thinking was converted into the universal aspirations for the whole of humanity. Modern forms of racism are an integral part of a process which included the scientific classification and hierarchical ordering of groups according to Western values, the nationalization of society through the developing institutions of the state, the conquest of foreign lands through a mixture of military, administrative and ideological power, and the Janus-faced contextualization of identity within a mythologized past and a bravenew-world future. However, if racism is inextricably linked to modernity, then might one expect that in the age of the end of modernity (if that is indeed the period we inhabit today) racism itself would disappear? If universalism has broken down, if Western values have been relativized in the wake of the empire's fightback, if the rivets which fused nation, state and culture have come apart through globalization and localization of capital, culture and communications, and if 'the other' has been released from its subjection to scientific laws on human nature (on the one hand) and the creation of 'Man' (on the other), then should racism not also have withered away in the process? Unfortunately, we know that the answer to this question is 'no'.

Culture, difference and identity For more than a decade, a number of analysts have used the term 'new racism (neo-racisme), to describe forms of racism which are substantially different from those of the modern era (Barker 1981; Balibar in Balibar and Wallerstein 1988; Bauman 1991a; Gilroy 1987; Guillaumin 1991, Taguieff 1988b). It is generally agreed that the major defining feature of this new racism is its abandonment of the old discourse of racial purity and racial hierarchy in favour of one based on cultural difference and cultural essentialism. Racial discourse is too closely associated with a discredited Nazism and condemned colonialism to be respectable today, whereas under the banner of 'culture' and 'nation' the stigmatization of particular groups can be couched in a more acceptable form. Taguieff (1995a:305) emphasizes the more indirect and implicit nature of this discourse, in which racist sentiment can be 'expressed without being declared, a substitute for direct and declared (or assumed) racism. The new discursive modes of racialization operate on the level of what is understood, implicit, connoted and presupposed.' Jean-Marie

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Le Pen's infamous description of the Holocaust as a 'detail' in the history of the Second World War is a good example of this, as is his apparently innocuous and 'common-sense' remark, cited by Georges I<:iejman in Le Figaro (12-13 May 1990), that 'the Jews have too much power in the press just as the Bretons have in sea-faring and the Corsicans in custom controls'. Etienne Balibar has described this indirect form of racism as a 'racism without races' (Balibar and Wallerstein 1988:32-33). It could be argued that the whole discourse on 'immigration', the 'problems of the suburbs' and 'national identity' is symptomatic of this discursive shift (Silverman 1992). It is within the context of these areas-new migrations, the changing city and the crisis of the nation-state-that concepts of self and other, and insiders and outsiders have been rearticulated in contemporary France, employing a language of cultural difference (religion, language, traditions, food, and so on) far more than the more overtly racist language of racial superiority and inferiority based on biological differences (cf. Gilroy 1992:53). Of course, the discourse of cultural difference is not entirely new, as we have seen in the case of Ernest Renan. Todorov (1989) demonstrates convincingly how, in the writings of a number of other prominent philosophers and historians of the second half of the nineteenth century (Taine and Le Bon, for example), the notion of race is transposed from the physical to the cultural plane. In the hands of these authors, culture (employed in an absolutist or essentialist way) can compartmentalize peoples in much the same way as race. Daniel Sibony (1993:141) suggests that the ethno-cultural base of racism has a much longer pedigree still, for hatred of ' the other' has always had a cultural component. In the modern era, most racisms have combined biology with culture to stigmatize others. Indeed, in France, as Balibar has observed (1991 :79), 'cultural difference has always received at least as much, if not more, attention than the strictly biological discourse'. However, the long-standing tradition of ethno-cultural racisms should not blind us to the function and status today of 'the cultural turn'. The contemporary discourse of cultural difference is not related to the universalist project of modern society or the scientific and hierarchical classification of peoples but, on the contrary, to the breakdown of that project, the shift from a hierarchical to a relativist perspective, and the rise of ethnic and cultural identities. In other words, the new racism of cultural difference is a symptom of the new times in which we live. As such it is bound up with those larger transformations of Western democracies that we have termed 'postmodern'. Indeed, the rise of cultural difference is probably one of the most potent signs of postmodernity. We need to consider some of the ways in which

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recent developments have produced new forms of discrimination and new modes of racist expression. On one level, the rise of cultural difference needs to be seen within the post-Holocaust and anti-colonial context of the 1940s and 1950s. It was at that time that the contemporary notion of the right to difference made its first major intellectual and political impact on French universalism. 2 The desire to delegitimize the scientific status of race after the Second World War was accompanied by a search for a new understanding of the relationships between peoples. UNESCO played an important part in this project through its declarations from 1949 onwards which effectively announced the death of scientific theories of racism (Taguieff 1995a:272). The crucial task was, as Colette Guillaumin observes (1991 :11), that of 'dissociating somatic from social and mental characteristics, and of breaking the links between these two areas which had hitherto constituted the meaning of the term "race" itself. An influential text which came out of this prodigious effort was Race et histoire (1952) by Claude Levi-Strauss. In this work Levi-Strauss detaches culture from race and suggests that the former is not determined by the latter (although he does not question the very concept of race itself as a valid category for the classification of peoples). His text is a plea for the recognition of the diversity of cultures which is threatened by Western assimilationism's quest for uniformity. He critiques the ethnocentrism of Western universalism and proposes a respect for different cultures founded on a relativism of values. Taguieff (199 Sa: 284) defines the three central characteristics of this 'culturalist' and anti-Western post-war anti-racism (cf. Leiris 1969): 'the autonomy of cultural phenomena, culture as the major determinant of mental structures and forms of life, and the equal value of all cultures'. In the hands of Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, the anti-Western thrust of Levi-Strauss's argument and the call for a right to cultural difference of subjected peoples (underpinned by an obsessive engagement with Sartreian existentialist philosophy) became the centrepiece of anti-colonial theory in the 1950s. Anti-ethnocentric and 'culturalist' anthropology and anti-Western colonial struggles therefore played a major role in transforming post-war thinking from a belief in the hierarchy of races to the recognition of a diversity of cultures. The new social movements of the 1960s exploited the calls for diversity and difference in their attack on the centralizing and unitarian nature of the state. The recognition of culture as what people do and the customs they practise (the conjoining of the anthropological and sociological definitions of culture-see Chapter 4) became the rallying

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cry for anti-authoritarian liberation struggles, civil rights movements and counter-cultural movements across a range of social strata. These developments are well documented and need little expansion here. Where they are crucial to the rise of new racisms is the New Right's adoption of the same categories of cultural difference for the purpose of exclusion. Colette Guillaumin (1991) has discussed the appropriation by the New Right of a discourse which had its roots in the anti-colonial and civil rights movements of the Left. Pierre-Andre Taguieff has been an even more assiduous analyst of the ways in which the New Right has made this discourse its own. His detailed study of the philosopher Alain de Benoist in the context of New Right discourse (Taguieff 1994) demonstrates the way in which LeviStrauss's formula for the preservation of cultures endangered by the imperialistic universalism of the West (see, for example, the preface to Le Regard eloigne) 1983) also provides the perfect raison d'etre for the defence of a European civilization which is threatened today by global capitalism and the incessant mixing of cultures and peoples. 3 There are clearly echoes here of the fears of mixing, miscegenation and hybridity expressed by the Comte de Gobineau in his classic study of 'the races' between 1853 and 1855, On the Inequality of the Human Races (Essai sur /'inegaliti des races humaines). Yet Benoist's ideas (which are characteristic of a particular type of New Right thinking intent on preserving 'European civilization') have little to do with the scientific racism of Gobineau's time, founded on the hierarchical distinction between higher and lower races. 4 Benoist's position is based on the postmodern anti-universalist platform of the right to cultural difference in the name of cultural pluralism and diversity. As we shall see, this appropriation of the anti-racist discourse of difference makes this new racism not only 'respectable' but also far more difficult to confront than theories grounded in a morally discredited biological essentialism and hierarchy. If modern forms of racism were generally centred first and foremost on a stigmatization of 'the other' ('altero-referential' racism), then postmodern forms of racism founded on cultural difference are more centred on the definition of the self and an exclusion of 'the other' ('auto-referential' racism; d. Taguieff 1988a). 5 In other words, we can detect here the end of the confident assimilationist logic of high modernity (which was indeed the clearest example of an 'alteroreferential' racism, the self not even identified as a 'race'), and the signs of a retreat into a relativist cultural essentialism, founded on a definition of the particular characteristics of the 'home' community and its differences from other communities.

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Contemporary racialized nationalism is preoccupied with selfprotection, not self-aggrandisement. As the philosopher and cultural critic Gilles Lipovetsky (1990:267) remarks, it has no connection with the nineteenth-century ideological project of assimilation of people to form a grand collectivity: '[Today] nationalist ideology is of secondary importance, or even of no importance at all, compared to our expectation that everyone belongs in their own place [chacun chez soiJ) and our individualistic requirement for protection by the powers that be.' All the major slogans of the Front National are indications of this particularistic concern with defining and preserving the cultural/ national boundaries of this community. !> The nationalism of the Front National fits the postmodern paradigm of defensive and particularistic nationalisms in a fragmented world, rather than the modern paradigms of assimilationist or differentialist nationalisms (despite the obvious similarities with the latter). As Lyotard observes: The multiplication of independence struggles since the Second World War and the recognition of new nations seem to indicate the reinforcement of the concept of local legitimacy and the end of the grand horizon of universal emancipation .. . . As the slogan of the Front National proclaims, 'French first [Ies Franrais d'abord)' . (Lyotard 1988a:54) New nationalisms coincide with the end of Ie roman nationa4 that is the end of the classical modern nation considered in terms of historical time and universal emancipation. Yet this brief description of the appropriation of the discourse of cultural difference by New Right ideologues-dislodging it from its previous articulation within the 'left-wing' anti-universalist, antiethnocentric and anti-state discourses of the post-war period, and rearticulating it within a discourse of cultural essentialism, nonmixing and the separation of groups-itself needs to be contextualized within a wider consideration of forms of identification and difference in contemporary France. As Balibar observes (1991 :79), it is not sufficient simply to outline a shift in discourse without also considering 'which structural changes have taken place in our societies which can account for this shift'. The framework proposed by Michel Wieviorka does precisely this by situating the rise of new racisms in the context of the crisis of the structures of modernity and the advent of a post-industrial society. In L'Espace du racisme (1991) Wieviorka argues that the contemporary racism of cultural difference acquires its significance in the context of the

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crisis of universalism and the decline of the strong social relations established in industrial society. The breakdown in the ability of the modern institutions of industrial society and the republican tradition (state education, secularism in the public sphere, trade unions, political parties, the army, and so on; cf. Nicolet 1982) to integrate people around the common projects of equality and solidarite ('an industrial, republican and universalist France', Wieviorka 1993b:202) has opened up a new space for the clash of cultural identities. The end of industrial society has led to the break-up of the former hierarchical class structure in favour of a model based on individualism and consumption and characterized by the 'dualization of society': 'you are either in or out' (Wieviorka 1992:29). It has also produced new urban degradation mimicking the model of the American ghettos in which 'social exclusion can be seen to be reinforced by a spatial exclusion' (Wieviorka 1992:31). Religion has returned as a major player in the stakes for communal construction of identity, as the secular and 'neutral' ideal of the Third Republic and the homogenizing aspirations of the nation-state falter in an age of pluralism and new ethnici ties. Yet religion is but one example of the rise of particularist cultural identities which have come to fill the gap left by the breakdown in social relations and the decline of social movements. 7 The political scientist Sami Nair proposes a similar analysis to that of Wieviorka: Today's civilization is founded on the unfettered globalization of the economy, the general deregulation of social systems and the institutional breakdown of the nation. These processes have undermined traditional forms of collective solidarity, accentuated selfish individualism and provoked irrational defensive reactions in which ethnic membership re-emerges as social identities disappear and religious affiliation is consolidated as ideological and collective identifications fragment. In this situation, ethnicity is of crucial importance as in ex-Yugoslavia. ('OU va la France?', Le Monde, 16 June 1993) The framework employed by Wieviorka and other sociologists who form part of the CADIS (Centre d'analyse et d'intervention sociologiques) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (cf. Touraine 1992 and 1994, Dubet and Lapeyronnie 1992, Lapeyronnie 1993, Wieviorka, ed., 1997; see also Nair 1992) is an important model for understanding contemporary racism. First, such an approach eschews the dominant perspective on popular racism

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which conflates racism and the Front National. The demonization of Le Pen simply marginalizes racism by situating it within a manichean concept of good and evil, and allows others to adopt (too easily and conveniently) the moral high ground (this is precisely what Jean Baudrillard has argued in 'La conjuration des imbeciles', Liberation, 7 May 1997). Second, by situating contemporary racisms within the recent transformations of Western societies, these commentators avoid viewing racism today as a simple repetition of ideologies and practices of the past. 8 Taguieff has frequently made both these points in his numerous critiques of anti-racism. However, if the model of post-industrial society is indispensable for understanding new racisms, other aspects of postmodern society should also be considered. For example, the wider cultural effects of social and economic upheaval are also crucial to the nature of difference today and the creation of new types of identity formation. The deindustrialization of the West ('less and le ss industrial and more and more based on technology and information', Nair 1992:221), the globalization of economies and communications, and the migration of peoples in the post-colonial era have certainly shattered the two major forms of identification of the modern period, those of class and nation. It is also true that the state no longer has the power (or indeed the will) to indulge in the social engineering of a homogeneous nation that characterized the centralizing state of the Third Republic; nor is it the focus of all aspirations to power now that power relations are dispersed across a range of local and global networks. Foucault's analyses of the multidimensional (rather than monolithic) nature of power flows (and also identities) are an important insight into the more fragmented and pluralist nature of postmodern societies within which contemporary racism flourishes (see also Chapter 5). Yet the globalization of the economy and communications has also had a remarkable effect on cultural flows and time-space perception which impinge directly on identities and communities. Time-space compression (Harvey 1989) has confused the distinctions between places and times. What was distant now appears close; the frontiers separating one place from another appear to be porous; the globe has become compressed into a flat and undifferentiated space. Similarly, the ubiquity of the image (see Chapter 4) has flattened the distinction between past and present; simultaneity has converted chronological time into a ceaseless present. The specificity of geographical place is no longer commensurate with the free-floating nature of mental space, while the connection between a common past and a shared present has been severed for good.

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On the one hand, this seems to be a process of reducing everything to the same, a new uniformity produced by the superimposition and condensation of disparate elements (hence the calls by some for a fixing of boundaries and a recreation of differences). On the other hand, it is quite the opposite process which seems to be at work, one in which nothing can stem the ceaseless tide of fragmentation, discontinuity, rupture and dislocation (hence the calls by others for a new universalism and a halt to ceaseless differentiation). Given this massive acceleration in change (is postmodernity simply accelerated modernity?), cultures and identities have been disembedded in a far more radical way than was ever possible in the classical period of modernity. Dislocated from specific times and places, the 'signs' of culture are free-floating, no longer solid or fixed, juxtaposed and rearranged in a weightless space (you don't have to be a Jew to eat a bagel). Cultures are in a state of constant flux, identities have lost their anchorage in anything solid. In Chapter 3 we will describe this development (following Lyotard, Bauman and others) as the triumph of aesthetic spacing over cognitive or rational spacing: that is, the breakdown in the hierarchical rational planning of societies in favour of a market-led play of seduction and consumption. In this context, relationships are fleeting, contractual, temporary and contingent. As we will see, there are two broad responses to this state of affairs which depend, ultimately, on new relations of power today-but which are both crucial for an understanding of new racisms. On the one hand, there are those who have the means to 'go with the flow', the nomads whose pleasure is derived from the hybrid nature of identity and the contingent nature of postmodern life. On the other hand, there are those for whom the absence of guidelines and boundaries is a profoundly anxious and fearful moment. For them, any raft in the sea of flux is a small mercy. The ever more desperate search for a fixed, pure and uncontaminated culture, and the obsession with community, fixed frontiers and a sense of 'home' are therefore the flip-side to the dislocation and fragmentation of cultures and identities that we are experiencing today. As Etienne Balibar (1998:115) has observed, we are caught between two extremes: 'a monolithic and univocal sense of identity and a floating identity which has no specific ties or traditions'. (For a tragi-comic fictional exploration of these extremes, see Hanif Kureishi's novel The Black Album.) The first of these responses might more obviously be connected to new racisms, yet the second response is not completely exempt from any connection. Free-floating identity founded on ceaseless differentiation can lead to a depersonalization every bit as troubling as the depersonalization of monolithic concepts of self and other.

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Furthermore, the celebration of difference can easily flip over to the fear of it. Even if Daniel Sibony (1988:10) is surely correct when he states (rather broadly) that 'racism means not accepting difference', we should be equally aware of the extent to which the apparent acceptance of difference today is not altogether unproblematic. This is not simply a question of the forms of cultural differentialism employed by the New Right which we discussed previously, which utilize an essentialist form of difference to preserve the 'purity' of the home community and exclude others. It is more a question of the narrow dividing line between celebration and fear and the fact, as Bauman observes, that postmodern tolerance is not that far removed from postmodern intolerance (1993:238). The Italian psychoanalyst and social theorist Alberto Melucci (1996:50) puts this ambivalence in the following way: 'The defensive resistance to the "other" is easily transformed into an aggressive attitude against the threat that the other represents. But also the claims to reciprocal understanding and communication are not entirely free from defensive attitudes.' In other words, these two responses are not opposites but are interrelated products of postmodern aesthetic spacing. 'The other' can be left as unprotected with the first response as with the second. This ambivalence around difference is a product of the new individualism and the new communitarianism of contemporary life. It arises from a situation in which the task of creating identity has fallen on to the shoulder s of the individual and where more 'organic' communities have broken down. In the high period of modernity (especially after 1870 under the Third Republic) the project of constructing identity was a fundamental aspect of the role of the state. It was the state's duty to fix the frontiers (territorial and imaginary) of the national community (cf. Noiriel 1988). Rootedness within a particular land and the consequent fixing of the frontiers between self and other were increasingly institutionalized, thus to a large extent removing that responsibility (and the moral consequences which resulted from it) from the individual. Today, the unriveting of that link between nation and state through the accelerating privatization of the state and the globalization of flows of capital, culture and information (which respect no national frontiers) means that the task of constructing identities and communities has, effectively, been deinstitutionalized. The individual has been left with the lonely task of self-improvement and self-construction. In this context, difference is no longer a stain which states are required to remove, a stigma in the blinding light of rational thought, emancipation and progress, what we must lose in order to achieve equal

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status with fellow citizens; the state no longer indulges in that form of cultural crusade. On the contrary, difference is today what we must achieve as a demonstration of identity. We are all required to proclaim our own difference. But, abandoned by institutions which could ground it in something solid, dependent on our own efforts to bring it into existence, identity today is a flimsy affair. It is contingent, rudderless and insubstantial. The privatization of identity-construction which has accompanied 'the reflexive, artificial and constructed character of social life' (Melucci 1996:43) means that communities must be imagined by a force of will on the part of the members alone. These postmodern imagined communities, unlike their modern counterparts (Anderson 1983), are not underpinned by the institutions of the state (or, if at all, only in symbolic fashion like the derisory political announcements of national sovereignty). The sociologist Michel Maffesoli has characterized such communities as 'neo-tribes'. These are collectivities which show all the signs of postmodern developments and are therefore not to be confused with the grand collectivities of the age of modernity, such as the proletariat or the bourgeoisie who were "'historical subjects" who had a mission to perform' (1988:22). N eo-tribes are ephemeral groupings, dependent for their existence on affective ties, feeling and empathy, and on the dissolution of the distinction between self and other, subject and object (and other binary oppositions). Using a model which echoes the distinction mentioned above between cognitive/rational spacing and aesthetic spacing, Maffesoli describes this development as the substitution of 'rationalized social planning by a "sociability" founded on empathy' (ibid.: 23). The former was defined by precise contours, 'clear demarcations, a plan and a goal' (ibid.: 111); the latter is imprecise, hybrid, unstable and contingent. Neo -tribe s are postmodernity's response to aesthetic space (socialite) in the way that the classes were modernity's response to cognitive space (un social rationalise). Maffesoli (1986:94) emphasizes the importance of technological advances in the multiplication of networks today. The new heterogeneity and polyculturalism of social spaces (which Maffesoli describes as the dominance of Dionysiac forces) is underpinned l arge ly by 'communication, pleasure in the here and now and the incoherence derived from emotional responses ... which produce both contact and rejection at one and the same time'. Here, then, we see once again the double-edged nature of contemporary encounters which can slide between the poles of attraction and rejection. Maffesoli observes that this ambivalence, which is familiar within the realm of psychology, needs to be considered more fully in terms of its social manifestations.

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Gilles Lipovetsky uses a similar analysis to that of Maffesoli and also emphasizes the differences between this postmodern form of 'tribalization' (founded on the self-construction of identity) and the modern system of classes: Postmodern 'tribalization' has nothing to do with the socialization of classes. What is significant today is the heterogeneous fragmentation of groups and the manifestation of ethnic and cultural signs as markers of identity. Neither is tribalization the communitarian reaction to contemporary neo-individualism. In fact, it is the other face of neo-individualism, both violent and unattached to class. The ethnicity which informs youth culture is not received from outside but is an 'autonomous' reconstruction of social ties, a brico/age made up of heterogeneous borrowings and traditions specific to urban everyday life. The flaunting of identity and ethnicity is a postmodern pick-and-mix culture. It is all about self-designation, affirmation of an identity in opposition to others, creating new networks of solidarity, manifesting one's sense of self [through] a patchwork of ethnic, graphic and vestimentary signs. (Lipovetsky 1991 :115) New racisms could therefore be said to be largely the product of the clash of neo-tribes, in the way that modern forms of racism were the product of the historical mission of nations and races. They are born from the fragmentation of the clear and rational structures of modernity, a loss of rootedness, a need to (re)invent an ancestry and to construct one's own existence in a deinstitutionalized age. The difference which is celebrated today in the name of 'identity' or 'community' is brittle and fragile, more froth than substance, dependent on marketing, self-proclamation, visibility in the media, yet lacking the firm foundations to make it 'stick', and liable at any moment to dissolve into nothing. However, in a world where difference is the badge of identity (at the same time, as we noted above, that global capital, culture and communications have produced uniformity on an unprecedented scale) nobody can afford to be without their difference and their own specific history. Consequently, difference needs to be imagined and reimagined, invented and reinvented, constantly in search of itself. The construction of cultural identity and difference today lacks the confident, universalizing and proselytizing aspirations of modernity. It is a defensive project, staking out its space in a world splintered along ethnic, religious and cultural lines.

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It is precisely the fragile and precarious nature of these neo-tribes, their need to reaffirm their identity (their difference, their distance, their territory) that makes conflict between them more likely and breeds a violence aimed at the most visible signs of 'otherness': for example, headscarves, synagogues, mosques, gravestones and so on. Bauman has highlighted the symbolic signific ance underlying the imagining of communities today:

In the world of imagined communities, the struggle for survival is a struggle for access to the human imagination. Whatever events therefore succeed in gaining such access (street battles before and after football matches, hijacking of planes, targeted or haphazard acts of terrorism, desecration of graves, daubing offensive graffiti on cult buildings, poisoning or contaminating supermarket food, occupying public squares, taking hostages, stripping in public, mass marches or city riots) do so first and foremost in their semiotic, symbolic quality. Whatever the damage actually visited upon the intended or accidental victim s of display, it i s the symbolic significance that counts-the capturing of public imagination. (Bauman 1992:xx) Recent reports on racist violence in France reinforce this aspect of violence today. For example, the 1991 report by the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'Homme) suggested that although acts of physical racial violence had not increased, there had been a significant increase in acts of 'symbolic' racial violence (Silverman 199Sa). The desecration of Jewish graves in Carpentras (9-1 0 May 1990) was the most publicized example of symbolic racist attacks in recent years, but the increase in graffiti, the desecration of other graves Qewish and Muslim), racist tracts, revisionist history denying the Holocaust, anonymous telephone calls, and so on, are other examples of what has been termed the 'banalization of racism'. Here, we are back once again with today's more 'casual' racism, employing the discourse of cultural difference, that we discussed earlier in this chapter. Taguieff also calls it a symbolic racism: 'Symbolic racism manifests itself, in public political discourse, by strategies of presentation and representation which correspond to the conditions of legitimate and acceptable behaviour in the public arena appropriate to the specific historical conjuncture' (199 5a:306). Lipovetsky too believes that the essence of the new racism lie s in its symbolic nature:

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Antisemitic and xenophobic violence is more symbolic than aimed at particular people. Herein lies its novelty: at a time when threats, graffiti, insults, tracts and grave desecrations are increasing in number, open and explicit violence of a racist or xenophobic kind is on the decrease. Social hatred of the other is aimed less at people and more at symbols, less at the living and more at the dead. (Lipovetsky 1992:157) The detour that we have taken has hopefully enlarged upon the nature of the 'specific historical conjuncture' which underlies this 'symbolic racism'. The 'banalization of racism' is a result of the breakdown in modern oppositions discussed by Maffesoli, the end of a 'strong' moral order, the flattening of history, the relativism of values and the break with old taboos. It emerges with the rise of postmodern democratic and pluralist society whose divisions and exclusions are founded on a retreat into an individualistic sense of belonging and an indifference towards others (d. Lipovetsky 1992:158-159). We can no longer be shocked; often we cannot even tell the difference between real and imagined violence. Jean-Pierre Le Goff makes the association between this new indifference to violence and our 'society of spectacle': When the intolerable becomes a spectacle or is transformed into a 'social fact', then indifference is the result. What can one do in the face of the daily spectacle of catastrophes, horrors and misery in the world? The repetition of images of suffering devalues their significance and renders us powerless to do anything about it. (Le Goff 1996:219) (see Chapter 4) The down-side of the thirst for and acceptance of difference is therefore the onset of indifference, or, as Charles Newman remarks (1984:9) in relation to an 'anything goes' artistic culture, 'a tolerance which finally amounts to indifference'. Difference is no longer to be effaced; it is desirable. But, as we have noted, the desire for difference is not that far removed from the fear of ceaseless difference. Henry Louis Gates J r observes, in relation to the way in which black culture has become youth culture in contemporary London, that the fact that it is hip for young workingclass white kids to speak with a Jamaican inflection does not mean that racism has disappeared: 'Imitation and enmity have an uncanny ability to coexist' ('Black flash', Guardian, 19 July 1997). It is this slippage between the two which characterizes contemporary France. The multiple

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encounters and interactions of contemporary life produce equal mixtures of celebration and fear of difference, and can ultimately anaesthetize us to the plight of 'the other'. In which case, the otherness of 'the other' (a/tiriti) which is simply not recuperable (non-recuperab/e), always 'unmanageable, threatening, explosive' (Baudrillard and Guillaume 1994:13) -what Julia Kristeva (1988) has termed 'strangeness (l'etrangeti)', Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume (1994) 'radical otherness (/'a/tiriti radica/e)', Zygmunt Bauman (1991a) 'ambivalence' -might be as elusive a (non)product today (if not more so) than it was in the modern era. If, as Guillaume says (Baudrillard and Guillaume 1994:19), 'otherness always constitutes a provocation', then we might ask (as we will in Chapter 4 regarding the end of the shock of the new, and the end of the avantgarde) whether we are today in an age when alteriti has died another death (just when we thought that the end of the modern, assimilationist and colonialist era would liberate us from this 'normalizing' and ethnocentric project), not because it has been obliterated through assimilation but simply because we have become anaesthetized against its power to provoke. In other words, are we at the end of our ability to be 'radically provoked' because, in an age when anything goes, nothing really matters and therefore nothing is shocking or transgressive-even though, as Baudrillard and Guillaume point out (1994:13), 'what has been embalmed or normalized can come to life at any moment?

The 'ends' of anti-racism A number of the above remarks are clearly not only applicable to contemporary France but are relevant to other modern democracies as well. Globalized capital and communications and the postcolonial migrations of peoples have created new contacts and a new sort of hybrid life (especially in the cities) in many such societies. The new individualism has profoundly undermined older forms of social collectivity and has led to the atomization of passions and the privatization of identity formation. As Sami Nair (Nair and Lucas 1996:46) has observed, 'the crisis of individuality, the displacement of the meaning of norms and values, the ambiguities of diversity and the unsettling nature of difference are all signs of the emergence of problematic identifications'. It is in this context of fragmentation of identity, the break-up of established time-space structures, and the creation of new cultural fusions and syncretisms that difference (celebratory or hostile) acquires its contemporary significance (cf.

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Rattansi 1994:27-28). The ubiquitous and ambiguous use of cultural difference has blurred the divisions between Left and Right, and between 'racists' and 'anti-racists' in a number of countries. 9 Where France is perhaps different in relation to these transformations is in the stark discrepancy between a powerful republican political culture (Nicolet 1982) and contemporary everyday life, between institutions and ideologies fashioned during the Third Republic and practices which have little to do with that era. Sami Nair (1992:219) talks of 'a republican model which has run out of steam' and asks, 'Are we not in the process of breaking definitively with the Third Republic?' (1992:222). The arena of racism and antiracism is a good case in point. Elsewhere (Silverman 1992) I have tried to show how the racisms and anti-racisms which have emerged from the politicization of immigration are profoundly connected with a republican (and highly mythologized) model of the nation founded on universalism, individual assimilation, secularism (laicite) and the neutrality of the public sphere, and in which signs of difference are stigmatized as contrary to the French tradition (cf. Blatt 1997). This classical Enlightenment perspective was highlighted at the time of the headscarf affair of 1989 when three Muslim girls breached the secular code of French schooling by wearing their Islamic heads carves in class (Gaspard and Khosrokhavar 1995; Dubet 1997). Yet the same focus surfaces routinely in the context of the question of 'immigration' and the 'problems of the suburbs'. In the discourse of many, the 'invasion' of cultural identities into the supposedly neutral political sphere (conflating the particular with the universal) is a recent phenomenon which must be resisted if social cohesion is to be preserved. The rise of cultural/ethnic identities is attributed to a confusing variety of sources: the 'invasion' of the cultural difference of the new 'immigrants' (used euphemistically to signify 'North Africans' and their children); the 'invasion' of the American-inspired differentialist discourse of anti-racism into the assimilationist sphere of the French republican tradition; the 'invasion' of the racist discourse and practices of the Front National into the 'anti-racist' republican tradition. This demonization of difference by republicans often goes hand in hand with the view that any concession to 'AngloSaxon' concepts of ethnic identity is simply a reinforcement of Le Pen's exclusivist brand of cultural nationalism, or, worse still, an endorsement of the racial policies of Nazi Germany and South African apartheid (Todorov 1995). In the republican tradition, multiculturalism is therefore too closely associated with racist forms of segregation to

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be considered as an acceptable path towards increased rights and protection from discrimination. The more liberal proponents of this version of French universalist republicanism (for example, Dominique Schnapper and Tzvetan Todorov) are simply guilty of re-enacting the Dreyfus affair in an age when the clear oppositions between republican and 'ethnic' nationalists can no l onger be creditably maintained. But the more extreme proponents of a similar argument are far more dangerous. In the worst cases of this (mis)reading of French history, France was 'race-free' before contemporary immigration and it is new forms of anti-racism (especially that of SOS Racisme of the 1980s) which are responsible for racializing French society, and the 'right to difference (Ie droit d la difference), which is responsible for the ghettoization of communities in the manner of 'the Anglo-Saxon world (Ie monde anglo-saxon),; (see, for example, Yonnet 1990 and 1993, Bejin and Freund 1986, Finkielkraut 1987 and Todd 1994).10 Here 'cultural difference' -a product of what Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher (1988:6) have termed 'the breakdown of the grand narrative of secularization' -becomes a euphemism for 'anti-France'. It is true that many countries have experienced a similar backlash against 'multiculturalism' and the relativism of value s introduced through the recognition of cultural difference. It is also true that the discourse of 'multiculturalism' risks reproducing the very discourse employed (in essentialist fashion) by the New Right to separate 'communities' for the purpose of exclusion (Silverman 1995b). One of the major questions for all Western democracies today is how to harness a respect for multidimensional differences to the need for common rules and social solidarity. Yet few have presented this problem in quite such manichean terms as France, since few pursued the modern universalist and Utopian dream of emancipation with quite the same rigour, enthusiasm and confidence as under the Third Republic. Today a republican political culture still profoundly attached to those modern ideals is frequently at odds with the postcolonial and postmodern reality of contemporary France. Alain Touraine points up the contradiction when he considers the anachronistic and misleading nature of the belief that ethnic and other communities are simply a leftover from the past destined ultimately to disappear. This was the illusion fostered by rationalism: the Enlightenment would remove the shadows cast by the family, the nation and religion.

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However, today's modernity is very different: we are immersed in it body and soul, reason and memory at one and the same time. (Touraine 1992:348) The inability to confront this new reality means that difference is immediately inserted into the classic modern paradigm of the hierarchical opposition between universalism and particularism, and consequently castigated as an undesirable foreign import to France (cf. Wieviorka, ed., 1997:5-8). This reveals a frightening discrepancy in France between official discourse and that of republican social commentary, on the one hand, and everyday life, on the other, in which cultural/ ethnic difference is ubiquitous. It also indicates an anachronistic republican rearguard action to maintain the division between the (universalist) public and the (particularist) private spheres when they have manifestly broken down. But, more worrying, it also leaves the path clear for the Front National to disseminate unchallenged its own vicious brand of differentialism. Numerous commentators have made this point, but the political classes and certain social commentators have shown no real signs of breaking with a cliche-ridden republicanism. So, at a time when a new social landscape has clearly emerged in which identities are shifting and multidimensional, and difference is a fact of life, the tired formula of integration (frequently a euphemism for assimilation) is still the major political and intellectual response (d. Bertheleu 1997). Anti-racism, too, seems incapable of breaking out of the old paradigm of universalism and difference inherited from the modern era. ll Taguieff (1988a) has demonstrated how the two major forms of anti-racism-differentialist and assimilationist-simply shadow the two major forms of racism-assimilationist and differentialist respectively. Recently, anti-racism has swung between equality and difference, or has adopted a mixture of the two. Cornelius Castoriadis ('Notations sur Ie racisme', Connexions) no. 48, 1987, quoted in Taguieff 1995a:530) has denounced 'the euphoric schizophrenia of the intellectual boy-scouts of recent decades who sing the praises of both universal human rights and the radical difference of cultures which would forbid any value-judgement to be passed on other cultures'. Castoriadis is surely right in his criticism, but this is only because the two poles between which anti-racism has swung are the extremes of universalism and particularism es tablished in the modern era as opposites. The real problem here is that equality and difference are still conceptualized within the modern antithesis of universalism and particularism. In that framework, it is not difficult to see the problems with both a concept of universalism founded on Western ethnocentric

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norms and values (which rejects difference), and a concept of cultural relativism which denies the possibility of any value judgements of other cultures (and therefore has no means of ensuring equality). That is why it is the framework itself which needs to be radically overhauled so that the concepts of universalism and particularism are no longer presented as opposites. The more complex structuring today of culture, difference and identity, discussed above, requires concepts which will be commensurate with the more fragmented and hybrid nature of contemporary life, rather than ones which simply try to fit old formulae to new times. In a book ambiguously and provocatively entitled Les Fins de /'antiracisme, Taguieff (1995a) analyses in depth what he depicts as the confused aims of anti-racism while, at the same time, hinting at the end of anti-racism as we know it (d. Gilroy 1992). Taguieff criticizes the media-oriented anti-racism of the 1980s (especially that of SOS Racisme) and its political manipulation by a 'mainstream' political class eager to capture the moral high ground and demonize Le Pen and the Front National. Anti-racism became a suitable logo either for selling products (for example, the Benetton adverts) or selling political parties (for example, the ex-Vichy functionary Fran<.;:ois Mitterrand joining the march against racism-in a suitable blaze of publicity - after the Carpentras desecrations in 1990). Taguieff is particularly acute in his analysis of the confused strategies and discourses of antiracism. Yet his views on the 'ends' of anti-racism are, ultimately, disappointing. He argues, in effect, for a revamped universalism in which human rights would not simply be seen as a sign of 'the rationalizing and conquering West' (Taguieff 1995a:532) but as beyond all particularisms (whatever the provenance of the codes themselves) and genuinely applicable to all and sundry. This is not so much a revamped universalism as a restatement of the conventional (Dreyfusard) republican position in which any renunciation of the separation between 'the public and private spheres, the state and religion, the social and the sacred' is tantamount to a surrender to the demands of 'Catholic reactionaries and "revolutionary" Islamic fundamentalists' (1995a:532). Not only does this vision reproduce the sort of die-hard republicanism which was so visible at the time of the headscarf affairs, but it also flies in the face of the de facto reality of contemporary society in which modernity's demarcation line between the public and private spheres has been breached. In an essay entitled 'Culture, societe et democratie', Michel Wieviorka (in Wieviorka, ed., 1997:21) highlights the reality of contemporary French society which Taguieff resolutely sets himself against, namely the blurring of the opposition 'between the spaces of

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political and personal life, between those of men and women, between work and the family, between the collective and the individual, etc.'. Elsewhere, Taguieff shows the same faith in the ability of the republican nation-state to withstand the assaults on it from supranational and sub-national forces. In the final section of a recent article entitled 'Par-deli communautarisme et nationalisme: la nation republicaine redecouverte', he extols the virtues of the traditional methods of 'integration' which are still capable of producing a cohesive community of citizens: The education system continues to carry out the function of cultural integration, and political action is still the path towards national citizenship, whether it be action of the more traditional sort (working in a political party) or of the newer sort (participating in charity or humanitarian associations). In short, citizenship has not been denationalized and, in spite of everything, the nation has remained the 'community of citizens'. The history of the French Republic is not over yet. (Taguieff 1995b:28; see also Taguieff 1996) This sort of universalist republicanism appears more and more anachronistic today and hardly constitutes a realistic way forward for anti-racism. Michel Wieviorka (1993c:70) also thinks that 'the idea of the post-national society is premature' and, like Taguieff, fears the breakdown of social integration and the rise of 'worrying differentialist nationalisms, somewhat sinister populisms and claims for ethnicity' (1993c:22). Nevertheless, he is far more willing to recognize that simple demonization of difference in terms of the rise of fundamentalisms (as in the quote above by Taguieff) is not a realistic proposition in a postmodern landscape: More often than not, France, much more than other countries, is wary of sanctioning the presence of difference anywhere outside the private sphere. Rather than accepting it as an element of democratic life, encouraging it to become a source of debate .. .we prefer in France either to deny difference, or repress it, or demonize it. ('Pour une politique de l'alterite', Liberation, 21 December 1994) Wieviorka situates this attitude to difference (and here he makes the distinction between France and other Western democracies) in the context of the powerful 'republican model of integration' in France.

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Describing what is specific to 'the French malaise' in his essay 'Culture, societe et democratie', he observes, 'it is still the case that the French feel intensely that their national culture is under threat, both from outside ... and from within with the rise of particularisms' (Wieviorka, ed., 1997:38). Wieviorka believes that, instead of simply demonizing 'Anglo-Saxon' multiculturalism, commentators, activists and policymakers in France must recognize the realities of cultural difference today. This recognition is especially imperative for the recomposition of the Left in France today and the reconstruction of a democratic platform (see Wieviorka, ed., 1997). He argues for a blending of universalism and particularism, of common goals and the recognition of cultural/ethnic identity: 'I advocate a combination of the right to difference and integration within the framework of the universal values of reason and the law. A certain concept of ethnicity could be compatible with this articulation' ('La France des tribus: un entretien avec Michel Wieviorka', Temoignage Chretien, 28 November 1992). Alain Touraine ('Et quand les banlieues exploseront', Globe Hebdo, 5-11 May 1993) takes a similar line, although with typically Gallic reservations about the worst consequences of ethnic identities: 'Nobody would want to encourage a politics of the ghetto with catastrophic consequences, but the fundamental aim of social integration cannot be achieved without some recognition of "cultural identity".' Yet despite their belief that the reinvention of social democracy today must break with the abstract universalism of the modern era and consider the material aspects of people's lives (including cultural/ ethnic identities), both Wieviorka and Touraine seem unwilling to adopt more radical concepts of identity which have been proposed more recently in 'the Anglo-Saxon world'. Wieviorka shows his 'modern' concerns, and the limits of his acceptance of cultural identity, when he views social cohesion as dependent on reducing demands for cultural difference: Popular racism is less than before associated with social relations as such, and more with cultural differentialism. This will be even more the case in the future unless the societies in which it occurs prove capable of reformulating the social question, reconstructing social debates and conflicts and preventing unfulfilled social demands from being subsumed within the proliferation of references to identity. (Wieviorka 199 3a: 18)

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Wieviorka is surely correct when he claims that it is the attention (and hostility) to the surface signs of cultural difference which underlies the shift of focus of popular racism. This is what I have argued above. Yet his belief that a reformulated social order depends on the reduction in demands for cultural identity appears to contradict his own criticism of the French approach to difference (quoted above), and to reproduce the very scenario which he critiques of a hellish descent into social disintegration and 'ghettoization' along lines of ethnic separatism characteristic of the 'Anglo-Saxon' world. Wieviorka's theorization of the rise of contemporary cultural identities remains a profound contribution to the analysis of new racisms in post-industrial societies. Similarly, his efforts in liberating the concept of difference and 'multiculturalism' from its demonized representation within the universalist French paradigm (cf. Roman 1995 and Bertheleu 1997) is admirable in terms of the necessary search for a new social contract. However, one has the impression that his acceptance of cultural identity is ultimately constrained by a 'modern' (rather than postmodern) model of society. Fragmentation is conceived through the familiar binary opposition between universalism and particularism. As I suggested above, anti-racism as a whole is caught on the horns of this dilemma. Certainly, one should not underestimate the importance of the reinvention of social ties and social democracy today, as Touraine, Wieviorka and others constantly argue. But it seems misleading to suggest, as Wieviorka does, that the 'space' of racism necessarily decreases in proportion to the 'strength' of social ties. After all, the 's trong' social ties of the modern era did not prevent the rise of virulent forms of racism. In a world in which the modern project of universalism is in crisis and where violence can spring from the struggle for difference, it is the dichotomy itself between universalism and particularism which needs to be reconsidered if new forms of solidarity and democracy are to emerge. The radical concepts of identity mentioned above that have more recently taken shape in Britain and America-for example, Stuart Hall's version of 'new ethnicities', Homi Bhabha's ideas on hybridity and a 'third way', the search by numerous commentators, activists and practitioners for non-essentialist and non-exclusivist forms of difference-at least have the potential to retheorize racist (and other) exclusions within a 'postmodern frame' (Rattansi 1994): that is, through a recognition of the inevitable fragmentation and multidimensional nature of identities in a transformed economic, political and social landscape. Of course, the translation of these ideas into a radical politics which can refashion the 'social' from the new 'sociability' (Maffesoli 1988)

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and avoid a neo-liberal new individualism, on the one hand, and a neotribal new communitarianism, on the other, is not at all assured. Hence the view (as stated in the introduction to this book) that postmodernity is, in Zygmunt Bauman's words, both chance and menace (Bauman 1991b). Yet at le ast there exists (as we suggested in Chapter 1) the impetus to break out of the modern dualism of sameness and difference, and seek a new ethics vis-a-vis ' the other' - an impetus derived (paradoxically) largely from French postmodern philosophy but adopted in a more far-reaching way in Britain and America than in France. The ' end' of old anti-racism could signal the beginnings of new anti-racisms whose ' ends' would be more local and multidimensional, and which would be responsive to the transformations in culture, identity and difference that have taken place in recent times.

3

City spaces

The modern city Most major aspects of modernity can be discovered in the development of the city and city life. Paris, for example, would epitomize the Utopian dream of the 'city of light (ville /umiere)', the ordered city, the centre of civilization (Roncayolo 1994:36), in Walter Benjamin's memorable phrase, 'capital of the nineteenth century'. Like the new republican social order being constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the city would be founded on the Enlightenment principles of rational design, uniformity and equality. The rhetoric that was to characterize this grand project-especially that of bringing clarity to where there is darkness, order to where there is disorder, coherence to where there is chaos-gave rise to a new vocabulary of metropolitan life, one that would 'make sense' of the city, frequently through the metaphors of the body or the machine (Donald 1992). The Marxist historian and prolific writer on cities Henri Lefebvre shows how the rationale behind the modern ordering of the city could exploit the medical imagery of the unhealthy body which required healing: Rational organization perceived the problem as one of constructing order out of chaotic confusion. Disorder is abnormal. How should it be normalized? .. Disorder is unhealthy. The doctors of modern society saw their role as doctors of a sick social space. What is the remedy? Coherence. The rationalist wanted to restore coherence to a chaotic reality. (Lefebvre 1968:27) However, as with modernity in general, the pursuit of the eradication of chaos, of the ultimate cure for all social ills and of a blueprint for a coherent, ordered and uniform city proved a Herculean and impossible task. Not only did the illusion of equality (produced especially through

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the uniformity of fa<;ades, cf. Loyer 1994:39) hide real social and economic differences but there were always bits that refused to fit in, leftovers, dirt, unruliness, an excess of meaning, the ambivalence that is the inevitable underside of all such projects for coherence (Bauman 1991 a), the '''refuse'' of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, sickness, death, etc.), (Certeau 1990:144). Concepts of order bred new concepts of disorder-those troubling bits of waste (dangerous classes, women, foreigners, and so on) which either had to be cleansed and brought into the realm of light (through the process of assimilation), or disciplined and put under surveillance to regulate their behaviour (Foucault 1976), or simply dispensed with. Christopher Prendergast highlights the essential paradox of the modernization of cities: the clearer, cleaner and more uniform the city came to appear physically, the more opaque and mysterious it came to seem socially, as governed by a contingent and chaotic play of forces, transactions and interests, to which one could not attach a correspondingly clear description. (Prendergast 1992:11) The classic Janus-face of modernity (brightness and darkness, order and disorder, Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysiac forces) was clearly at work in the construction of the modern city. The city's human, civilized public spaces, founded on the principles of rational design, which could bring together and unify a disparate population (especially through new forms of mobility 'which both brought people into close contact with each other and allowed them to move very quickly from one place to another', Roncayolo 1994:37) coexisted with the dark seething mass of ghettoized slums inhabited by 'the dangerous classes' (Chevalier 1978) -and no amount of policing the frontiers between the two realms could prevent the spillage of one into the other. In other words, the contradictions of modernity lie at the heart of city life. The development of capitalism and rapid industrialization had social effects which no amount of state-led social engineering could contain. The rational mapping of the city was not only incapable of harnessing diversity into a single blueprint for a 'concept city' but inevitably produced its own 'unreadability'. Michel de Certeau, one of the most perspicacious commentators on this tension between order and disorder in the modern city, observed: 'beneath the discourses which ideologized the city proliferated the streets and the multiple combinations of power networks which had no readable identity, could not be mapped

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conceptually, escaped rational transparency, and which were, in short, impossible to manage' (Certeau 1990:145). Beyond the imposition of the single vision, the modern city was therefore transformed into a cornucopia of new sights, sounds and sensations which made it a source of rich cultural, sexual and aesthetic pleasure (and pain) and provided new ways of conceiving of and exploring identity. In Walter Benjamin's terms, the disenchantment of the social world brought about by progressive rationalization (that one sees most clearly, for example, in the Haussmanization of Paris) was accompanied by a re-enchantment brought about by the very byproducts of that same process. The new cities became reworkings of the mythological labyrinth in which the clarity of line and the maze, order and disorder, coherence and those elements which inevitably escaped rational control and Utopian planning progressed in tandem. It was this rich tapestry constituted by metropolitan experience which fascinated writers like Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, Apollinaire, Breton and Aragon, and painters like Manet, Degas and Van Gogh throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. One might even say that the new aesthetic of modernism was essentially an urban phenomenon in that it was, at heart, a response to the movement, the diversity, the random and transitory nature of encounters, and the juxtaposition of disparate elements that characterized life in the new metropolis (cf. Bradbury 1976). Unlike any other topography, the city provided a complex network within which the tensions between self and other, the individual and the crowd, past and present, near and far, movement and stasis, desire and control-to be found at the centre of the works of many of the above artists and, indeed, at the core of modernism-could be worked out. Modernism explored the interface between the new forms and wonders of the metropolis and human sensibility and desire, for these went hand in hand. As James Donald has said: rationalizing plans had unexpected and unintended consequences. One was an emerging aesthetic of modernism: that is, a distinctively new sensuous perception or experience of metropolitan life that was formalized in new techniques of representation and new- modern-artistic movements. These often revealed the products of the reformed cities to be, not just more efficient, but also phantasmagoric, grotesque, and even inhuman. (Donald 1992:423)

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The Baudelairean figure of the jianeur, the gentleman stroller, so brilliantly dissected by Walter Benjamin (1983), is the archetypal manifestation of this fascination with the new and re-enchanted spectacle provided by the modern city. The jlaneur was to the ordered and regulated city what modernism was to modernity: that is, the counter-culture, the other face, the flip-side which disrupts the circumscribed and institutionalized 'coherence' of rational planning, defies the controlled meanings of modern social spacing and transforms the clarity and 'legibility' of the city into an opaque and magical labyrinth. Fundamental to the pleasure attained by the jlaneur's perambulations in the city is the delight taken in the transitory and fleeting nature of the moment, the absence of any attachment to a fixed sense of place or to specific goals, the detached nature of the look (a form of male voyeurism) as opposed to engagement in social relationships, and hence a fascination with the spectacle of everyday life. The jlaneur poeticized and mythologized the new, the transitory and the 'bizarre'. Indeed, Baudelaire maintained that the new poetry must be constructed from the material provided by the new cities. In the figure of thejianeur, city space and its everyday life are treated as a way of exploring the inner turbulent life of the looker/poet. The pleasure of the jianeur is derived from the transgression of social boundaries, while a new poetry is born from the aestheticization of everyday life in the city. However, the extent to which the jlaneur-and indeed modernism as a whole-transgressed social boundaries needs to be put into the wider context of prevailing class and gender relations (among others). The jianeur identifies with the marginals of city life, but is also distanced from them in that he is a member not of the impoverished classes but of the leisured class. He is a bourgeois gentleman. Apollinaire's narrator in the poem 'Zone' (the first poem in his 1913 collection Alcools) can return to Auteuil, a posh suburb of Paris, after his wanderings in the less salubrious parts of the city. His class therefore allows him a freedom which is not available to those with whom he identifies. Furthermore, the jlaneur's aesthetic response to modern city life is profoundly determined by male desire in the public sphere ('a masculine freedom', Wilson 1995:65), for, as Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson point out (1995:4), 'The male gaze of the modernist jianeur eroticized life in the city, sexualizing the spaces it viewed' (see, for example, Baudelaire's poem 'A une passante'). As Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock have both demonstrated convincingly, Baudelaire's figure of the jianeur/ artist can function as an observer in the crowd, and 'can look without being watched or

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even recognized in the act of looking' (Pollock 1988:71) only by dint of his sex (and, as Pollock points out, by his class). Wolff (1985) writes of the invisibility of the female jlaneuse, a point which is substantiated by Pollock: Women did not enjoy the freedom of incognito in the crowd. They were never positioned as the normal occupants of the public realm. They did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch .. . . They are positioned as the object of the jlaneur's gaze. (Pollock 1988:71) Elizabeth Wilson (1992, 1995), on the other hand, has problematized this view by suggesting that women were not simply objects of male desire and control, not simply denied access to the public sphere in any other form than that of the prostitute (and even then, she wonders, 'could not the prostitutes themselves be seen, ultimately, as thejlaneuses of the nineteenth-century city?' (1995:71)), that they were also able to transgress the social/sexual boundaries inscribed in the city, and that the jlaneur himself represents 'not the triumph of masculine power but .. . masculinity as unstable, caught up in the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization' (1995:74). Gender and class critiques of the jlaneur highlight the fact that he cannot simply be celebrated unproblematically as transgressive of modern social boundaries since he is himself predicated on the different (though not necessarily fixed) locations with regard to public and private spaces of men and women, and the lei sured and working classes (d. Rifkin 1993:66). The jlaneur occupies, instead, an ambivalent position with regard to dominant social norms (an ambivalence which is most apparent when viewed in the context of the commodification of social relations in the developing nineteenth-century metropolis). Cultural modernism in general might therefore more accurately be viewed as the ambivalent counter-culture to rationalizing modernity. It was not completely 'other' to the new social and economic processes of modernity, yet it challenged some of its fundamental tenets. The modern city exemplified this tension between 'determined opposites': between the forces of order and disorder, between the totalizing gaze of the planner and the fragmented and transitory sensations of individual everyday experience, between the 'readable' and the ' unreadable' (Prendergast 1992:16). The city of light and the public sphere of citizenship, constructed under the ideology of equality, fraternity and liberty, were founded on the social marginalization of

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women, the proletariat, foreigners and others who could only be represented, within this paradigm, as a problem to be regulated. The Utopian projects of Haussmann in the previous century and Le Corbusier in this century (the city of light and the machine d habiter respectively) thus both contained their own inevitable contradictions. Today cities have been transformed yet again in line with postindustrial and postmodern changes. Debates about the possible death of the city therefore have a resonance that goes far beyond urban questions, for they are symptomatic of a crisis in modernity itself. Olivier Mongin (1995) wonders whether, after the classic European city and then the grand urban Utopias, we have now entered the phase of 'the third city', founded on a new understanding of time and space and the recognition of the fallibility of past Utopias. In his introduction to Mongin's book, entitled Vers fa troisieme ville, the architect Christian de Portzamparc (whose expression 'third city' Mongin has adopted) puts contemporary 'democratic' developments in the city in the context of past experiments and asks the fundamental question as to whether the changes that have taken place in recent years signify an advancement in human freedom or a regression: It was assumed that the city could be planned, shaped, controlled by the dominant powers. However, in our contemporary democracies, the city appears to be the result of a multiplicity of contradictory and incoherent processes. It escapes control and unity. Attempts to treat this problem inevitably fail to deal with large areas of city life. Is this unpredictability, multiplicity and disorder the sign of greater freedom? Has the city finally rid itself of its mathematical 'frock-coat', of its architectural 'straitjacket', of the principles of order and intimidation which Georges Bataille so detested since they symbolized a profound suppression of freedom and life? (cited in Mongin 1995:9) The following discussion considers whether the tensions constitutive of modernity have indeed given way to a rather different paradigm for the regulation of city life (more fragmented, more contradictory, more pluralist), and whether this 'democratization' of the city heralds a genuine freedom or whether, instead, it merely announces oppressions of a different sort.

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From time to space, from the social to the aesthetic

In his important book on 'the reassertion of space in critical social theory', Edward Soja cites Michel Foucault's description of the change of paradigm that has occurred in recent times, from one concerned with time to one concerned with space: The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world .. . . The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-byside, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is le ss that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. ('Of other spaces', Diacritics) 16 (1986),22-27, cited in Soja 1989:10) Foucault clearly sees this shift from time to space as crucial to the shift away from modern forms of organization. The linear and chronological mentality, with its clear distinctions between past, present and future, which is fundamental to the modern notion of progress, collapses into a present space consisting of diverse elements from different 'times' and 'places'. Clearly this movement from time to space was already announced by the revolutionary techniques of cultural modernism. Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du temps perdu) like many other works of the period, flattens the chronological life-process of realist narrative by discovering connections across time; it breaks dramatically with a positivist definition of subjectivity by positing instead the power of the unconscious mechanism of memory to transcend purely temporal demarcations; and it announces the classic modernist elision between the past life of a 'character' with the present act/ space of the 'writer'. The past is conflated with the present within the space of writing itself. The flaneur, as we have seen, operates a similar 'spatialization' of time with regard to the city. His pleasure comes from juxtaposing and rendering simultaneous elements which rational design wishes to confine to separate realms. Like Proust's, his is a metaphorical imagination (see also, for example, the works of Claude Simon). In other words, a diachronic perspective (with its grounding in history) is

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replaced by a synchronic perspective (with its grounding in the simultaneity of the present) (cf. Kumar 1995: 146-147). Today's spatialization could therefore be seen as the democratization of connections formerly perceived only by a narrow elite of avant-garde artists and philosophers. But quite clearly the democratization of the spatial imagination is not due to the fact that more people have taken to reading Baudelaire or Proust recently! Numerous processes have contributed to the shift in paradigm noted by Foucault and have affected us all, most notably the globalization of capital and culture and accelerated patterns of migration and forms of travel. In her immensely stimulating (though at times rather reductive) book on the reordering of French culture in the 1950s and 1960s, Kristin Ross (1995:19) highlights the way in which the carwhose 'production, transformation into discourse (i.e., advertising, media representations), and consumption and use' she takes as exemplary of twentieth-century modernization-institutes a mode of mobility which 'freezes time' and nullifies history. She cites Jean Baudrillard, writing in 1967, on the way in which the mobility of the car collapses time into space: Mobility without effort constitutes a kind of unreal happiness, a suspension of existence, an irresponsibility. Speed's effect, by integrating space and time, is one of leveling the world to two dimensions, to an image; it loses its depth and its becoming; in some ways it brings about a sublime immobility and a contemplative state. At more than a hundred miles an hour, there's a presumption of eternity. (Ross 1995:21)1 This spatialization of time is possibly even more profoundly in debt to the revolution in information flows and communication. Film became the perfect medium for transforming the 'density' of time into the simultaneity of a two-dimensional space, captured on celluloid. Today, the world has shrunk still further to the size of the TV screen and the computer terminal. Never before has such a simultaneity of diverse elements been possible, and never has the juxtaposition of elements separated in time and space been achieved so completely as with the advent of recent technological developments. David Harvey (1989) has coined the term 'time-space compression' to define this phenomenon. These processes have had a profound effect on the topography of cities and consequently on the nature of the social relations that are

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produced in the city. The new movement, new encounters and new classes which characterized the new cities of the nineteenth century, and were associated especially with modern forms of industrialization, have today been transformed under the influence of post-industrial late capitalism. The technologization of flows of capital and communications has disrupted the links between place, culture and identity (Massey and Jess, eds, 1995), producing a process of deterritorialization (uprooting our former sense of place and identity) and reterritorialization (positioning us within different time-space networks). The local is itself more and more global: that is, a hybrid space composed of a mosaic of diverse pieces from diverse places. The juxtaposition of disparate elements in the postmodern city is at the expense of the Utopian search for uniformity and coherence that characterized the modern city. In this transformation we can detect all the tensions between new opportunities and new dangers for social relations that are a feature of the contemporary period. On the one hand, this evolution signifies the end of all blueprints for the regulation of city life, and the possibility of a flowering of new types of expression and encounter. Fragmentation of a 'master' plan (founded on rationalism, coherence and social engineering) heralds the age of diversification and pluralism and the possible emergence of the sort of heterogeneous site (beyond the hierarchies and binaries of 'Cartesian' space) that Foucault (1986) defined as a 'heterotopia'. It is clear that the de-centring of metropolitan experience has seen the emergence of new styles and voices and the cross-fertilization, or hybridization, of culture. What was formerly located at the margins (both in physical and in cultural terms) is now at the centre; or, more properly, the break with universalist, egalitarian (and ethnocentric) norms has flattened the hierarchies of old and dispersed the centre across the surface of the metropole. As Jill Forbes has remarked in relation to new cultural practices in the city: The art of the 1980s and 1990s celebrates a different city, one which belongs to the marginal and the underground as the perhaps paradoxical source of creativity and energy .... The hidden or obscure places under and around the city and their eccentric denizens are now taken as its defining locus, its source of meaning and lieu de vhiti. More than this, the artist no longer observes from a fixed point.... In the 1980s and 1990s [they] are in transit or displacement across the city; their point of view is mobile and fragmented, not all-embracing. (Forbes and Kelly 1995:256-257)

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Examples of this cult of underground, hidden and exotic Paris can be found in the films Diva, Subway and Les Amants du Pont Neuf. The works of postcolonial writers, film-makers and musicians are also a sign of the new cultural pluralism challenging the Eurocentric norms of old (see Hargreaves and McKinney, eds, 1997). In this sense, the postcolonial and globalized postmodern city could be seen as the locus for an awakening and celebration of previously hidden, stigmatized or repressed voices and the emergence of counter-cultural forms occupying new spaces of resistance to established order (although to what extent they remain marginal and transgressive once they are brought into the realm of the commodification of the cultural 'exotic' is open to debatesee Chapter 4). However, despite the new opportunities today for voices which were formerly marginalized, it would be naive to celebrate the virtues of this new democratic and heterogeneous space (in the manner, for example, of Gilles Lipovetsky 1983, and Paul Yonnet 1985) without pointing up also the limitations to freedom imposed by the new order. The optimism of the post-war project of social housing (which saw the construction of the big council estates, or HLM, in the suburbs of the big cities) has more recently given way to the apocalyptic prognostications which have accompanied the 'problems of the suburbs' and the explosive violence of those who feel economically and socially excluded from participation in society. In France, la banlieue (the suburbs) has become the major euphemism for the racialization (and fragmentation) of city space, symbolically representing the anxieties and sense of crisis of our age, from the fear of drugs, violence, AIDS and religious fundamentalism to the more general 'malaise' of Western democratic societies. It is as if what was once categorized as the 'underside' of city life, which planners and visionaries of a previous age attempted to order, regulate and control, has now broken free from its former constraints and threatens to 'pollute' the body politic (a vision that Sophie BodyGendrot has characterized as the "'third-worldization" of the national space', 1993:81). The opening up of a more pluralistic sense of city space therefore carries with it the danger of new forms of fragmentation and segregation along racialized (and other) lines. It is no coincidence that today's social problems are conceptualized less in terms of inequality following class domination and more in terms of marginalization and exclusion (cf. Genestier 1994:197), for these reflect the spatial dimension to disparities in social organization today (cf. the discussion of social exclusion, and the analysis of Alain Touraine, in Chapter 5). This process of spatial fragmentation both fuels new racisms (as we saw in the

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previous chapter) and is a genuine cause for concern for all those worried by the breakdown in social solidarity and the rise of new forms of exclusion (see Chapter 5). As Jacques Donzelot and Joel Roman have remarked, there is no longer an organic link connecting the popular suburbs to the city. The suburbs now exist outside the system, as if they no longer have any raison d'etre and have simply been left to their own devices. They have become synonymous with exclusion. (Donzelot and Roman 1991 :6) Olivier Mongin (1995) highlights two general features which characterize the contemporary crisis of the city: the disjunction between civic culture and urban life and the failure of urban Utopias. Recent developments which have brought about this disjunction between urbs and civitas are numerous and complex. Lipovetsky (1991) claims that it would be wrong to use nineteenth-century terms to understand this crisis. He suggests that it is the new individualism and narcissism characteristic of postmodern social and cultural developments which provides the major context for an understanding of the contemporary city. The public spaces which were formerly places of sociality and mixing have given way to a privatization of individual needs and desires. Individualistic hedonism has taken over from civic duty and the public interest. He writes: the traditional city dominated by the creation of a public sphere is dead. Now the city is constituted by a multiplicity of networks in which individuals associate intermittently according to their personal trajectories and their private interests, motivations and desires. (Lipovetsky 1991:108) The atomization of the social, leading to new freedoms for some but new tensions and antagonisms for others, is a general feature of the contemporary city which most commentators describe. New city spaces clearly intersect (and always have intersected) with questions of the social and citizenship (hence the title of the conference and book, 'Citoyennete et urbanite', of which Lipovetsky's essay forms a part). 2 But the new individualism is only a general feature of this reconfiguration of social spaces. Paul Virilio's essays on contemporary city life deal largel y with the effect of the information and communications revolution. He describes the growing divorce between

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the virtual space of the new electronic highways and the physical space of geographical sites, and hence between those who do or do not have access to the new technology. In Vitesse et politique (1977) Virilio considers the links between movement, immobility and power (see also Balandier 1985:155-161). In the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie controlled the movement of the masses, hence immobilizing their disruptive potential through the imposition of social and institutional structures. This clearly has links with Michel Foucault's carceral, disciplinary and surveillance society, or Michel de Certeau's centralized society whose immobilizing tactics are actively resisted by the creative acts and 'pedestrian rhetoric' of ordinary citizens. According to Virilio, the rise of the electronic city rearranges the relationship between mobility and power, yet still works to deny freedom to large numbers of people. Now it is those who are cut off from access to the electronic highways who are removed from the locus of power, for today power is less connected with the physical spaces of the city than with the virtual spaces of (invisible) global electronic networks (cf. Graham 1997). The new division between physical and virtual spaces has therefore created new inequalities in society. As Manuel Castells has said, we are witnessing 'the historical emergence of the space of flows', which supersedes ' the meaning of the space of places', and although 'people live in places, power rules through flows' (cited in Donald 1992:452). The advent of global information processes means that mental space has become more detached from its link with physical territories. This means that for some a sense of place has become less and less dependent on physical locus, while for others-constrained to live within the confines of specific places ('the suburbs' in particular) -space and place are still more tightly connected. In an interesting comparison of Certeau and Virilio, Verena Andermatt Conley (1996) points out that Certeau's belief that walking is a way of 'rusing' with the regimes of power that regulate the city seems wildly optimistic, given the changed nature today of regimes of power. Virilio's analyses suggest, on the contrary, that, if power operates more and more through the invisible flows of fibre optic channels, then those who are not networked and are confined to the physical space of the city are once again 'immobile in their mobility' (Conley 1996:168). Commenting on Conley's analysis in the same collection, Michael Sheringham puts this succinctly: If for Michel de Certeau the everyday practices of mobile, individual citizens maintain habitability, the analyses of Paul Virilio suggest that the city street is no longer the locus of power and

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wonder, and that citizens cut off from the networks engendered by advanced technology may be as immobile as sitting ducks. (Sheringham 1996:7) The work of the anthropologist Marc Auge on the changing topography of the city from modern spaces to those regulated by what he terms 'super modernity (surmodernite)' - see also Balandier 1994suggests a similar division of citizens in metropolitan areas, and a breakdown in socialization. Notwithstanding the continuous process of change and 'dis embedding of the social system' characteristic of modernity (Giddens 1990:21), the modern space, or lieu, was nevertheless, according to Auge, a site in which culture and identity remained relatively localized within a constrained spatio -temp oral context. They were places of social meeting and mixing. But advanced technology, migration and new forms of travel have created different spaces characteristic of 'supermodernity', which Auge (1992) calls 'nonplaces (non-lieux),. These spaces-examples of which are airports, the banking system, shopping malls, motorways, supermarkets (cf. Chemetov 1996) - 'interpellate' us as individuals (rather than as members of a wider collectivity) and produce the anonymous identity of the fleeting passenger or the customer. In the 'non-spaces' we are no longer bound by a fixed and stable structure governing relationships but enter into a purely contractual arrangement which lasts only as long as the moment itself (Auge 1992:127-128). For some, the 'nonspace' might be a place of freedom: the floating and weightless experience of (s)he who is cut loose from all restrictive ties. For others, they are places of anonymity and fear: the frightening experience of (s)he who has no bearings and no fixed structures. But although they claim our attention as if we were all equal individuals, all equally able to enter the contractual relationship on the same basis (we are all interpellated equally), these spaces elide the social differences which are a feature of postmodern life. And furthermore, by their very nature, they deny social mixing by producing merely 'a meeting with one's self' (1992:131; d. Sheringham 1995:218). Auge, like Virilio, believes that modern spaces still exist but they are threatened by the new processes regulating city life: The modern place is still a social, distinctive and historical place; it is not a post-modern space. As for the circuits and the freedom of improvisation so beautifully expressed by the jlaneur, in the modern place they mesh perfectly with both technique and technology. On the other hand, the dissociation between the means

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of transportation and the ways of communication (highways on the one hand, pedestrian streets on the other) brings about a new aesthetics and another logic, which are not those of modernity .... Supermodernity is characterized by the acceleration or enhancement of the determining constituents of modernity, and by a triple excess (of information, images and individuality), which, in the technologically most advanced areas of modernity, creates the practical conditions for immediacy and ubiquity mentioned by Paul Virilio. Non-places are the contemporary spaces where supermodernity can be found, in conflict with identity, relationship and history. They are the spaces of circulation, communication and consumption, where solitudes coexist without creating any social bond or even a social emotion. (Auge 1996:177-178; see also Segalen 1993:220 who adopts a similar perspective to that of Auge) Virilio's analyses highlight the shifting patterns of power in these recent developments. He does not simply demonstrate that advanced technology signifies an erosion of 'an art of the eco', as Conley puts it, but seems to be announcing a radical departure from the modernist dialectic (which can be traced from Baudelaire to Certeau) between the concept city and the lived reality, between the centralizing and controlling gaze and the subversive intervention by Ie peuple faced by this 'imposed immobility' (Conley 1996:170). This tension between unity and fragmentation, order and transgression, was operative in an age when controlled boundaries guaranteed temporal distance and spatial separation. But the audio-visual revolution has effaced these distinctions and has collapsed them into the single space of 'Real Time in which there are no boundaries .. . . Hence the former tyranny of distances between geographically dispersed subjects has progressively given way to this tyranny of real time' (Virilio 1995:31). In this transformed landscape individual perambulations in the city (or even mass protest on the streets) might not be an effective means of challenging the sites of power today. Pierre Sansot's belief that 'the city is composed and recomposed at each moment by the moves of its inhabitants' (Sansot 1996:139; see also the poetry of Jacques Reda) might need to be revised in the light of new networks of information, exchange and power in the city. We should also remember how Certeau's romanticized image of the walker as one who disrupts the power regime of real estate (immobilier), ignores the fact that for those who roam the streets today with 'no fixed abode (sans domicile fixe)" "'walking" ... reflects less a challenge to the power of those who own

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the city than one of the miserable effects of that power' (Prendergast 1992:211). This divorce between physical space and power flows also announces a split between the visible city and the 'work' or productive aspect of city life. The era of global information and capital flows and postFordist modes of economic production (in which the production of products or the dealings of capital frequently go on 'elsewhere') has loosened the 'organic' link between external appearance and internal reality. (Can one even talk of 'inside' and 'outside' any more, in an era in which that distinction has been progressively effaced?) The external appearance has been transformed into a depthless fa<;ade which gives no indication of what takes place 'behind' or 'beyond'. Hence the proliferation of surfaces-detached both from what they 'contain' and from each other, yet similarly bland and uniform-which are nothing more than fronts announcing their own reality. As Jill Forbes has observed:

In Paris it has not only become less and less possible to discern from the exterior appearance of a structure what its function is, but fa<;ades have in some sense become functions. It is as though Haussmann's concern with imposing uniformity in the height and design of fa<;ades had been translated to the entire city, turning it into one immense fa<;ade which, like its many modern buildings faced with reflecting glass, tells us nothing about what goes on inside. (Forbes and Kelly 1995:254) Fran<;oise Choay (1990:314) describes this development in terms of a transformation of the city from a place of exchange (lieu) to a simple object of exchange for the promotion of products. Urban marketing has therefore replaced the sense of lived space. Choay's perspective clearly owes much to the earlier critiques of 1960s consumer society by Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard and others. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (1996:19) describe how Lefebvre's Le Droit d la ville (1968) already signalled the way in which 'the logic of the market has reduced ... urban qualities to exchange and suppressed the city as "oeuvre'''. The loss of the complexity of the city as oeuvre is also central to the concerns of the contemporary poet and writer on cities, JeanChristophe Bailly, whose book La Ville d I'oeuvre (1992) is a passionate defence of the multilayered city in the face of the uniform logic of the market. Elsewhere Bailly contrasts the contemporary city as an object of exchange with nineteenth-century Paris, and suggests that today the

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effacement of the material life of the city (the city as 'a meeting place') has gone hand in hand with the banishment of the city's 'problems' to the suburbs: It is not only the 'dangerous classes' who are banished, as far as possible, to the edges. It is also the visibility of the process of work. This progressive banishment of productive activity means that goods are only presented in their final state, that is, as objects for sale. Nineteenth-century Paris was not only a city of shopfronts but was also a city of workshops .... Today, everything that is unfinished, perishable, cumbersome, noisy, in short everything that presents us with the spectacle of its fabrication seems to have been removed from our gaze. (Bailly 1994:274)

No longer offering 'the spectacle of fabrication', cities are increasingly offering spectacle alone. They have ceased to function as a world of interweaving signs which exist on different layers or levels and have been converted into a disconnected alignment of surfaces. Using an argument that mirrors the attack on the self-reflexivity and surface play of postmodern art, Bailly bemoans the fact that representation of spectacle has become dissociated from its truth value: 'representation has ceased to be the presentation of another reality and has become pure sign ... that is, stripped of impurity and the weight of meaning' (Bailly 1994:276-277). The one single criterion that regulates the flow of signs today is that of instant readability, so that complexity and ambiguity are sacrificed at the altar of accessibility. Bailly detects two trends as part of this new reductive 'language' of the city: on the one hand, a plethora of surface signs, and on the other the impoverishment of signs linking different spaces (Bailly 1994:273). Bailly's vision of the contemporary city is that of a world of signs divorced from the world of signification, the spatial equivalent of the post-structuralist description of language in which signifiers float free of their attachment to specific meanings. Bailly (1992:40) develops the comparison between the 'language' of the city and language itself in a manner which pays homage to the tradition of the Baudelairean fJaneur and to Certeau's 'rusing' with the regimes of power in the city: 'We speak in language and we walk in the city .... Both language and the urban world are animated by the multiple movements which are engendered in this process' (cf. the section entitled 'Le parler des pas perdus' in Certeau 1990:147-154). Like Virilio and Aug€:, Baillyundoubtedly a modernist at heart-regrets the disappearance of a

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complex but interconnecting language of the city, for bland surfaces ultimately represent an impoverishment of life. Like each parole in language, walking in the streets should be about making connections between individual subjectivity and outer 'reality', between personal memory and (public) history. Walking in the streets should be a bridge between the physical topography of 'outer' space and the imaginary topography of 'inner' space. For the city is, in Bailly's words, 'a veritable patchwork in the most literal sense of the word, that is, a composition of woven material' (Bailly 1992:73). Using another metaphor for the city-that of the body-he states, ' just as, in acupuncture, a needle inserted next to the tibia can help cure neuralgia, so there exists a similar circulation of messages in the city' (1994:278). The effacement of these interconnections, or 'body' of meaning, leaves in its wake an array of dazzling but sanitized and disconnected surfaces, what Henning Bech has termed 'telecity': The screen mediated world of the telecity exists only by way of surfaces; and, tendentially, everything can and must be turned into an object for the gaze .. .. There is, by way of 'readings' of the surface signs, opportunity for a much more intense and changing empathy in and out of identities, because of the possibilities of uninterfered and continual watching. (quoted in Bauman 1996:27-28) Baudrillard interprets this free-floating space as the end of the public sphere in the city: When space is simulated and representation has ceased to exist, the city implodes as a public and political space. We have the impression that this is no longer a public space but a space for publicity, whose dimensions are not at all the same .. . . This space of publicity is a space regulated by the image. (Baudrillard 1991:157-158) (see also the work of Regis Debray to be discussed in Chapter 4) It is now the eye which is bombarded with visual stimuli at the expense of a complex language of the city. For a number of the commentators mentioned above, it is this shift from word to image, the spoken to the visual, which is crucial to the contemporary disaggregation of city space and the social habitus of the city. Fran<;oise Choay puts this process in the following terms:

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An urban space is not simply a visual space but concerns the whole body. To view city space simply in terms of a visual aesthetic is therefore a highly reductive manoeuvre. Our everyday reality does not correspond to the bird's-eye view but is lived on the ground. Furthermore, this approach fails to appreciate the fact that an urban space cannot be fixed at anyone moment but is the sum total of a succession of fragmentary sequences and different times and trajectories. (cited in Mongin 1995:44) Although modernity clearly transformed the 'language' of the citydisrupting and reformulating the connections (pursued by modernist writers and artists) between place, the past, memory and identity-it also established, in the process, a complex interweaving of different layers of 'reality'. However, the fear expressed by Choay, Bailly, Auge, Virilio, Reda and others is that recent changes have effaced that complex and layered language, banishing, at the same time, a 'lived' sense of place (lieu)) and replaced it with representations or simulations of that reality (which in fact simply signify the disappearance and loss of that reality). Hence, the cult of the preservation of heritage (Ie patrimoine) is an indication of the anxiety that surrounds the loss of the past and a sense of time, and the need to fill that absent space (cf. Choay 1992). Lived place, with its popular and private memories which were frequently at odds with official history, is replaced by the idealized (often kitsch) reconstruction of the past, driven by 'media systems, capital and politics in order to be consumed as a heritage myth' (Westwood and Williams 1997:3). Marc Auge (1992:95) suggests that these glib reconstructions of time and place 'are merely a way of articulating present space'. The outer appearance of the city, therefore, takes on the form of a painted but empty shell, or a bland fa<;ade presenting a two-dimensional version of history (while the 'work' of the city takes place through the hidden networks of fibre optic channels of communication). As Auge comments elsewhere (1996:179): 'The whole world is nowadays transformed into images and shows. This is particularly true in big cities: renovated housefronts, floodlit monuments, protected areas inexorably turn the city into a life-size stage set' (d. Kofman 1993). Mongin (1995:50) calls this 'the museified city' and contrasts it with that other image that we have today of the city, one of violence and excess ('the jungle city'). 'The museified city' is accompanied by the transformation of the j/iineur into the tourist:

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The more the city is transformed into a museum, the more we run from one museum to another, from one city to another, in search of what the city can no longer offer us as tourists who have forgotten how to be pedestrians. (Mongin 1995:75; ef. Urry 1990 and Bauman 1996) Auge (1992:138) compares the contemporary 'museification' of the city with the complex patterning of modernity: 'Baudelaire's modernity was characterized by a continual mixing ... an interweaving of the ancient and the modern. Supermodernity, on the other hand, has made the ancient (and history itself) into a spectacle.' According to Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard (1993:31,33), this process which has transformed the lives of those living in 'the megapole' is that of a 'generalized aestheticization' in which style has become the ultimate value. Zygmunt Bauman (1993: Chapter 6) uses the same terms when he defines the passage from modern to postmodern sensibility as the evolution from cognitive social spacing to aesthetic social spacing, that is, viewing the city today not as rationally planned space but as spectacle. Baudrillard (1991 :162) describes this phenomenon thus: 'It is no longer a social space, rather a space which is liberated and expanded but where, in fact, there is no distance.' Distance is linked to cognitive spacing which separates out and defines boundaries between elements. It is associated with the teleological and scientific modern mind. Aesthetic spacing, on the other hand, signifies the abolition of distances, the collapse of the 'density' of the social into the flat and undifferentiated space of surface and representation. It was precisely the aesthetic spacing of the flaneur which disrupted the 'social coherence' of the modern city. As we have noted, the juxtaposition of disparate elements from diverse places and times produced a flattening of the hierarchies and dichotomies which underlay rational (or cognitive) social spacing. The fascination with what is fleeting and contingent (rather than fixed and rooted) disrupted a teleological sense of time by questioning the very fabric which ties moments together in a chronological sequence, hence allowing those moments to float free in an unfettered space. In this sense, we can see once again how the postmodern norms of contingency, simultaneity and the sense of an endless present could be defined as the democratization of the spirit of cultural modernism. We are all flaneurs today (although we do not all have the same means to indulge our habits). Or, as Bauman has said: The stroller and the strolling waited at the periphery for their hour to arrive. And it did arrive-or rather it was brought by the

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postmodern avatar of the heroic producer into playful consumer. Now the strolling, once the activity practised by marginal people on the margins of 'real life' , came to be life itself, and the question of 'reality' need not be dealt with any more. (Bauman 1996:27) But if the 'art' of the flaneur has moved from the margins to the centre (just like marginal or sub-cultures in general) this democratization of his aesthetic- and especially its commercialization-has radically affected its status. The fascination and wonder of the city for the flaneur were derived from the unconventional connections he made between his imaginary desires, on the one hand, and the outer topography of the city (including, of course, its inhabitants) on the other hand (see, for example, Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris or Andre Breton's Nacija). The richness of the experience comes from the interconnections between subjective and objective, past and present, (public) history and (private) memory, the everyday and the eternal. As Michael Keith and Steve Pile (1993:8) say about Walter Benjamin, his work as 'jlaneur immersed in the urban experience ... is about the intertwining of experience, knowledge and spatiality'. However, it must be recognized that the policed boundaries and hierarchies of modernity were a necessary prerequisite for the nourishment of this sensibility (and for the art of transgression to which it gave rise), for they brought into existence the marginal realms which enabled the poet/flaneur to act as an outsider to social convention and morality, and ally himself with the otherness of rationally ordered society. As Michael Sheringham says, commenting on Benjamin, Breton and the poet Jacques Reda, for all three writers the experience of urban wandering involves temporal dislocation. But if the future is suspended as the present becomes suffused with the past, we always remain in a border zone, between now and then, and between the city's own historical archive and that of the individual. (Sheringham 1996:112) But the postmodern conflation of these oppositions, the 'normalization' of what is transitory (our 'throw-away' culture), 'exotic' and transgressive, the reduction of everything to surface and an endless present are in danger of eradicating this 'border zone' (and, in the process, effacing the modern poet at the same time) by eradicating the very distinctions between the different spheres themselves.

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Ironically, what was the source of that rich texture explored by modernist poets and artists is now the source of the eradication of texture. The blurring of dichotomies (the aestheticization of the social domain) was only transgressive in an age when those binary oppositions were the pillars of social spacing. The surrealists, for example, 'sought what was most disquieting in the streets of Paris or at the fleamarket, in the unusual juxtapositions and coincidences that made up everyday life. Art and life were here and now' (Lipovetsky 1983:129). But the blurring of art and everyday life today-so dear to the surrealiststhreatens the very existence of a texture composed of different planes. 'The city is a handful of secrets thrown to the forbidden winds', says Thierry Paquot (1990:135). This poetic vision of the modern city might be purely illusory in the light of postmodern developments.

Encounters in the city The democratization of the art of theflaneurtoday-no longer confined to the margins but now life itself-has, as Zygmunt Bauman indicates above, been achieved through the conversion of the stroller into the consumer. Of course, the playful look of the gentleman stroller (the metteuren scene of life's vicissitudes), the fascination with the contingent, the transitory and the evanescent, and with the spectacle of the city, were never far removed from the seductive lure of the commodity for the customer. Was it not in the arcades- those temples of consumption-that Walter Benjamin located the equivalence between the desire of the Jlaneur and the seduction of the consumer?3 As Jod Roman observes (1996:34), 'the development of the city goes hand in hand with its economic corollary, the development of the market'. Yet if the flaneur formerly occupied a border zone between controlling and being controlled by the object of his gaze, just as he occupied that other border zone between 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity', then it is possible that today that border zone has been thoroughly commodified, so that the lure of the spectacle of city life signifies the final act in the metamorphosis of the flaneur into the customer: From the start, there was money to be made out of the flaneur's affliction. Wittingly and premeditatedly, these spaces [the arcades] sold pleasurable views to look at. In order to attract the customers, though, the designers and the owners of those spaces had to buy them first. The right to look gratuitously was to be the flaneur's, tomorrow's customer's) reward. Pleasurable display, fascinating view,

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the entlclng game of shapes and colours. Customers bought through the seduction of the fJaneur,· the fJaneur, through seduction, was transformed into the consumer. In the process, the miraculous avatar of the commodity into the shopper is accomplished. At the end of the day, the dividing line has been blurred. It is no more clear what (who) is the object of consumption, who (what) is the consumer. (Bauman 1993:173-174) For Bauman, this development heralds not the extension of freedom (as the liberal free-marketeers would have us believe) but a further constraint upon it: The most cherished of flaneurisme seductions-the right to write the script and to direct the play of surfaces - h as been expropriated by the designers and the managers and the profitmakers of the shopping malls. The scripts are now ready-made and expert-made, discreet yet precise .. .le aving little to the imagination and less still to the spectator's freedom. (1993:177) To what extent, then, has the (male) looker become a victim or object of consumption (in the way that women habitually were) rather than the detached observer of its specular delights? This is a far cry from Jean-Christophe Bailly's modernist vision of the city: 'The history of the city is that of a permanent combat between the production of a constantly displaced excess of meaning and the control of all social forms which reproduce this excess by those in society who exercise or maintain their power by naturalizing these forms' (Bailly 1992:27). If Bailly is right about the history of the city, then Bauman's comments on recent developments (which echo Bailly's own fears) might make us wonder whether, in the passage from modern to postmodern forms of organization of the city, postindustrial societies like France have not jumped from the frying-pan into the fire: that is, that by breaking with the rational, Utopian language of urban and social design (which in its day strove to contain and control the free flow of meaning in the city), they quite possibly find themselves in thrall to a different master, that of late capitalism whose exploitation of the 'excess of meaning' is for the purposes of selling, rather than challenging social convention. Does the ludic quality that Henri Lefebvre talks of still exist today, or has the democratization of this 'playfulne ss' been achieved under the banner of consumption (with its consequent

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inequalities of access built in) rather than under the banner of genuine democratic access to new spaces? If it is true that the democratization of 'strolling' is best epitomized today by the customer's perambulations in the sanitized environment of the pedestrian precinct and shopping mall, and if (as Bailly suggests) the proliferation of endless surfaces is at the expense of a network of meaning in the city, then this has both moral and political consequences of a profound nature. Today the fragmentation and speed of city life have converted the eye into a ceaselessly mobile instrument, compelled to flit from one surface to another but not allowed to rest long enough to see further than the surface itself. We have thus become more and more detached from any involvement in 'meaningful' relationships (in the same way that the jldneur, in order to indulge his playful aestheticization and eroticization of the city, had to distance himself from the crowd and, in one sense, function as a voyeur). The aesthetic space which we inhabit today-with its emphasis on the affective, the pleasurable, the gratification of instant and constantly renewable sensation and desire-is, as Bauman points out (1993: Chapter 6), not conducive to a responsibility for 'the other' which is at the heart of any moral spacing. The aesthetic space of the postmodern city works to transform us from social beings-with a sense of living with others-into 'nomads' for whom others are objects of our transitory gaze but with whom we have no time to establish a relationship. Encounters with others in the city therefore involve little or no sense of attachment. Fleeting encounters stimulate the senses but are not conducive to long-term contracts, as Auge's descriptions of 'non-places' confirm. But, then, the nomad is not concerned with long-term contracts, for (s)he has no sense either of being attached to the past or of what might happen in the future. It is only the present that matters to the nomad. As Keith Tester has pointed out, drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: the whole point of the nomad, of course, is that as an individual or a group the nomad simply travels. The journey has no point; it has no place of origin and neither, for that matter, does it have a destination. The nomad has no fixed identity, rather his or her identity is simply something which emerges out of the transient play of roles, resources and relationships. But, and as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have realized, to the extent that the travelling of the nomad has no point, and to the extent that the nomad moves in a milieu which has no boundaries and therefore

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no places and no directions, the nomad is historically stationary. 'The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space, he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement .. . the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move.' (Nomad%gy: The War Machine, trans. B. Massumi, New York: Semiotext(e), 1986, p. 51) (Tester 1993:75) Uprooted from an attachment to temporal chronology, the nomad occupies a free-floating space. This concept of the nomad who is immobile in his 'smooth space' recalls Paul Virilio's description of the immobility of those for whom the virtual space of the new electronic networks has replaced the 'real' space of geographical sites (see also Jonas 1984). It is worth insisting on the part played by advanced technology in the creation of this new 'nomadic' space. But the point that I wish to make here is one that concerns the ethics attached to nomadic aesthetic space. We noted in Chapter 1 how the replacement of a 'Hellenic ' rational order with a 'Hebraic' nomadism signalled, according to a number of philosophers, the end of the modern urge to assimilate or annihilate ' the other', and heralded a new ethical stance vis-a-vis 'the other'. Yet the rejoicing at such a development is perhaps premature in the light of what we have said above; namely, that this deregulated space might be a consumer's paradise (for some) but a moral backwater (for most) (cf. Rose 1993), and that the fragmentary and transitory nature of encounters in the city might be as damaging to moral life with others as modern forms of obliterating individual responsibility (cf. Bauman 1996:32-35). Marc Guillaume (Baudrillard and Guillaume 1994) uses the term 'spectrality' to define the dispersal and simulation of identity which characterizes city life today (and which can be seen in its purest form in contemporary forms of communication, ibid., 25). In breaking 'the stable ego' and the (supposed) unity of individual consciousness, the processes which regulate communication flows in the city have channelled relationships into a ceaseless stream of differentiation which ultimately leads, paradoxically, to the meaninglessness of difference and an 'eclipse' of 'the other':

In our control societies, the management of otherness no longer functions principally through discipline and normalization but through transformation and 's pecialization' of the masses. Consumption, communication, transport and mass urbanization produce the cohabitation of millions of selves who are in

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proximity with each other yet do not see each other, who enter into exchanges with each other without having dealings with each other, who meet each other without confronting each other. 'The other' is eclipsed .. . . This industrial processing of differences renders difference meaningless and monotonous and reduces it to specks of otherness. Our innumerable encounters and exchanges are fragmentary and 'spectral'. They leave no room for troubling otherness and therefore contain no risk of unsettling our selves. Conflicts are transformed into 'problems' and arbitrations into 'solutions'. This is how a multitude of interactions are routinely managed. This is the relatively efficient solution to Kant's question of 'unsociable sociability', of the unsociable urban phenomenon of big cities today. (Baudrillard and Guillaume 1994:13) 4 Guillaume (Baudrillard and Guillaume 1994:34) detects two possible emotional responses inspired by 'spectrality': on the one hand, a fear of ceaseless differentiation which results in a retreat into imaginary shelters for identity; on the other, the (orgasmic?) pleasure derived from the dispersal, dissemination and hybridization of identity. As we saw in the preceding chapter, these two responses are at the heart of our strategies for negotiating difference today. They are also crucial to the new division in the contemporary city described by Virilio, that is, between those who have the means to 'go with the flow' and those who are locked more and more firmly into their 'Euclidian space' (Conley 1996:170) and obliged to invent ever more feverishly their bearings. Those in the suburbs are not only physically situated outside the gates of the city; they are also cut adrift from the wider networks enjoyed by their fellow city-dwellers. Can one then even talk of belonging to the same community of city-dwellers when the gulf between those inside and those outside the walls seems everwidening? Mongin (1995:108) suggests that this phenomenon calls into question the very possibility of representing urban society: 'There is much talk today of civic society... but recent developments have provoked a serious crisis in cities in that many people are no longer full citizens, that is individuals who belong symbolically to the same collectivity.' The postmodern city is a space of seduction and circulation but is it, or can it also be, a space of sociality? If the modern city was (ideally, it should be emphasized) a meeting-place for a diverse population around the common principles of uniformity, equality and civic order, are we witnessing today a fracturing of the population according to who has and who lacks the means to survive in a world of ceaseless

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differentiation? The result of detaching looking and circulating in the city from its institutional and social grounding threatens the very sense of sociality and poses serious ethical questions about relationships and political questions about solidarity. What chance is there for ethics when 'face-to-face' contact is disappearing beneath a proliferation of simulated encounters? And what chance is there for a renewed sense of citizenship when the (social) citizen is increasingly in danger of being transformed into the (atomized) consumer? (See Chapter 5.) Or do these bleak hypotheses underestimate the new possibilities on offer today? After all, if the rationalized and 'coherent' social spacing of modernity could neither disenchant the world completely nor eradicate the ambivalent affective life of individuals but, paradoxically, led to a re-enchantment of both through different forms, then could it not be the case that postmodern aesthetic spacing will also achieve a reworking of myths and a renewal of meaningful imaginary identifications through different modes? Michel de Certeau's optimism with regard to modern city spacing might serve well with regard to the current age: It would be superficial to believe that rationalization has abolished myth, for the notion that the streets have been 'disinfected' of myth is mistaken. On the contrary, myth is dominant. It implants into surface images society's dreams and what has been repressed. It reappears everywhere but through different channels to those of the past. (Certeau 1993:36)

Making connections Many of these questions about living in the city today are raised in a fascinating book by the writer and left-wing ex-publisher Fran<.;:ois Maspero, Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990), which records his journey through the suburbs of Paris accompanied by a friend and photographer, Anaik Frantz. Fran<.;:ois (as the narrator is called in the text) treads in the path of Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Breton in the sense that his pedestrian wanderings among the marginal inhabitants of 'the zone' (those who have been excluded from the centre of Paris both physically and socially) are an exploration of the dialectic between inner self and the outer topography of the city. Yet, unlike the flaneur who disrupts the order of modern social spacing by his aestheticization

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of city life (with no commitment on his part to those he objectifies), Maspero's narrator, on the contrary, seeks to make connections in a space which has become fragmented, diversified and uprooted from its anchorage in a spatio-temporal and social context. As Fran<.;:ois says (p. 21), 'nothing connects dispersed localities which are thrown together as if by chance like jumbled letters in the alphabet. Space has disintegrated and is in fragments.' Walking through the suburbs has become a forgotten pastime-except, of course, for those who live there and have been rendered immobile in their ghettos. 5 For those who have the means, these are simply spaces which one passes through: People don't journey in the Paris region any more. They move or jump from one point to another. What is in between is the undifferentiated spatio-temporal site of the train or car journey, a grey continuum which nothing links to the outside world. (p. 22) (cf. Virilio 1989) Rather than cultivate the fleeting image based on the transitory nature of the chance encounter and the non-committal nature of the aestheticizing and voyeuristic gaze, Fran<.;:ois tries to enter into dialogue, therefore breaking the first taboo of all voyeurism. He transgresses the frontiers between different city spaces, not in the form of the gentleman of leisure whose pleasure comes from his freedom to rove where he pleases and from his aestheticization of 'the other', but in the form of an anxious and self-conscious outsider attempting to make connections: one who neither reduces ' the other' to the same, nor exoticizes the other's difference, but who gropes towards a different understanding of and relationship with the stranger. Fran<.;:ois brings out his baggage (rather than hiding it in voyeuristic fashion) and expects others to bring out theirs. The encounters which then ensue are consequently determined not by the non-committal look of the so-called 'free' and unencumbered observer (in a position of power over his subjects) but by a certain sense of dialogue, involvement, responsibility (commitment even?) and morality. This can be seen most clearly in Anaik's photos. Anaik photographs ' frontier' people (p. 18) -marginals, tramps and so on, that 'world of frontiers' which casts back an anxious reflection on our own world. She cannot sell her photos because they are non-functional: that is, they are no good as commodities in the market. Rather than show a surface gloss they reveal instead the 'anxieties' of her subjects (p. 19). She refuses to objectify her subjects ('I'm no good at postcards,' she explains; p. 297), preferring instead to send them her photos so that

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the whole photographic experience itself becomes a dialogue between photographer and photographed rather than an impersonal and objectifying experience. (She realises, at one point, that she has transgressed her own rule when, during the journey, she photographs some Malians without knowing them and without having asked their permission: that is, precisely in voyeuristic fashion, pp. 127-128.) The photographs, like the encounters as a whole, are not simply records of a momentary event during the journey but are an attempt to incorporate into that moment of freezing and fixing a sense of depth, dialogue, responsibility and moral weight- all things which are resolutely effaced by the fleeting image today. They are a snapshot which links this moment with others (with a past) in the same way that the journey on foot through the hinterland of the suburbs (rather than simply flashing through them via the motorway) is an attempt to reintegrate space and time, memory and history, which have become disconnected fragments. The text is therefore an attempt to reinstate a certain density of experience beyond the spliced image to counter the play of depthless surface and perpetual present. 6 Maspero resolutely refuses the journey of the morally disengaged stroller of the contemporary city who is in thrall to the seductive surface of the commodity. He refuses to eulogize what Gillian Rose has termed 'nomad' city, the postmodernist paradise of the maze whose so-called freedom and infinite choice, according to Rose (1993:51), simply masks 'the idol of the market-place'. Nor does he withdraw into the imagined communitarianism of a home retreat, safe from the stranger. Instead, he challenges the segregated, ghettoized, fragmented nature of postmodern city life, challenges the concept of the city as a differentialist spacing of disconnected 'zones' or disconnected surfaces. In short, he refuses to aestheticize difference, either through an unequivocal celebration of 'the other' or through the erection of a wall to keep out 'the other' -the two classic modes, or 'siamese twins' as Zygmunt Bauman has called them, of postmodern differentialist thinking. Similarly, the fragments of personal memory, political and social history, and cultural works which intertwine during the course of the journey (in which the distinctions between private and public, subjective and objective, are always indistinct) are not juxtaposed in simple relativist fashion, but are drawn together, put into dialogue with each other, made to question each other, encounter each other in the same way that different city spaces are made to connect, thus challenging their distinctness and separateness. In both a temporal and a spatial sense, the text becomes a sort of mosaic of interlocking pieces but one that never finally coalesces into a glib and totalizing whole (cf. also Rolin 1996).

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Here is just one example of this process. One of the stops on the line on the way in to the centre of Paris from Roissy is Drancy. The Cite de la Muette housing estate in Drancy started its life as one of the most innovative designs for social housing in inter-war Europe. The intervention of the war and the occupation of northern France by the Nazis in 1940 meant that the estate remained unfinished and was then used as the main camp for the round-up of Jews by the French police prior to their dispatch to the concentration camps in the east. Maspero interconnects a detached and 'factual' description of these events with a commentary on Jews, a commentary on the architecture of the building and its relevance in terms of social housing, the nature of social housing in the 1960s, and then the inhabitants today, most of whom are firstand second-generation immigrant families. In other words, Maspero constructs his own architecture, composed of multilayered discourses across time, space and genre, and invites us to ponder on the connections between these different layers. When talking of the present inhabitants he states that the wartime history of the Jews in Drancy is not their history: that is, the history of the people who live there now. Whose history is this, then, and how should it be recounted? What is the link between past and present and between different ' communities' -the North African and other immigrant inhabitants today and the Jews who passed through fifty years before on their way to the gas chambers? And what is the relevance of this multilayered account of Drancy to the city as a whole and to France in its bicentenary year? Maspero refuses to give us clear answers to these questions. His technique is rather to draw together different fragments and make them 'speak' to each other so that at least these difficult questions are on the agenda. We are left with a sense that the only possible history of Drancy (like other places described on the journey) is a multifaceted one in which the past is not simply a fixed and monolithic entity, the same for everyone, but neither is it simply a fragmented collection of entirely different stories. Similarly, this place does not exist in a vacuum but is connected with other aspects of the city and the nation. However, the connections have to be made through the journey itself and through the telling of the stories. Past and present fragments and different city spaces are made to connect only in the process of journeying and memorializing. These are connections which are not 'out there' waiting to be resurrected but can only be produced and constituted through the human effort of walking, talking and writing. Jeffrey Weeks' general comment on the construction of human solidarity fits well with Maspero's project in the text:

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Human solidarity [is] a project not of realising what already is there, undiscovered beneath our noses, but of constructing bonds across the chasm of difference ... the universal is itself relativised, becoming not an unproblematic given but an articulation of a variety of social discourses and logics around an evolving project. (Weeks 1993:196) History here, then, is not a question of the revelation of hidden truths beyond the disconnected surface images: the past cannot be fitted to the present in such a deterministic way. It is rather a quest for connections, the quest itself, the journey, as an integral part of the historical process. Maspero's effort seems to be to seek reconnections through dialogue, rather than submit either to the atomization of disconnected voices, moments and images, or to the simplistic construction of new imagined communities speaking, each one, with a single voice. What he does is to walk, talk and write. As we noted above, this might be anachronistic in an age of advanced technology. Yet it does express an overwhelming desire to reconnect and rediscover solidarities in a fragmented world. Walking and talking, involving face-to-face interaction, are the forgotten arts which Jean-Christophe Bailly and Paul Virilio also advocate as a way of resisting the relentless process of the atomization and demoralization of social relations. Maspero's text embodies Bailly's search for a language which can renew the links, once again, between centre and periphery: Whilst at the centre an over-abundance of urban signs (deprived of any substance) seems to produce the slow suffocation of the city, on the margins it is the chronic absence of these signs (and their substance) which stifles life .. . . An organic link attaches the problems of the centre to those of the periphery, for those within and those outside the walls are connected like two communicating channels, but whose points of contact have been smothered. We must reopen these channels. (Bailly 1994:278) However, if the problems of reconnecting in a fragmented world are clearly visible, the new moral and political language of living with difference is still in its infancy.

4

Cultural debates

Probably the most over-used word in recent French debates about culture is 'crisis'. Clearly a sense of crisis is not particular to France alone, for the fragmentation and decentring of the notion of a universal culture is a major feature of contemporary Western societies. Yet in France the crisis is felt particularly acutely. Culture is so intricately connected with the nation and with the civilizing mission of the state (in both metropolitan France and the colonies) that the transformation from Culture (in the singular and with a capital 'C') to 'cultures' (plural and lower-case) touches profoundly on the more general crisis of the nation-state today and the question of difference and pluralism. However, the sense of crisis goes further still. For what is really at stake-beyond the belief in universal culture as a cornerstone of national and social integration-is the demise of the Enlightenment dichotomy between the transcendent world of the spirit (l'esprit) and the beautiful (Ie beau) and the more worldly sociological and anthropological spheres, or in other words between art and everyday life. This process (inherited from cultural modernism but extended dramatically over the last few decades) has blurred the distinctions between creation and life-style, and between culture, leisure and entertainment. Most significantly, the breakdown in the dichotomy between art and everyday life has confused the distinction between culture and commodity. This chapter seeks to explore these aspects of recent debates about culture.

From Culture to le culture1

In the age of modernity, culture was at the heart of the Enlightenment project to haul people out of their particularist and parochial ghettos and bring them into the world of light and reason. Culture-meaning classical or high culture founded on a concept of creation and the

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life of the spirit-was a major weapon in the state's armoury in its mission to civilize and socialize its citizens. Alain Touraine demonstrates the connection between culture, reason and social integration in relation to the principal institution of the state required to carry out this function of social engineering, namely the school: The school. . .sought to detach the child from his particularist background and put him in touch with Reason, either through scientific culture or by bringing him as close as possible to the great works of the human mind, to philosophy and art. From the German concept of the Bildung to Andre Malraux's construction in France of cultural centres (maisons de la culture), one can trace a continuous effort to link the inculcation of the ways of reason and beauty with the task of social integration. (Touraine 1992:405-406) The cultural policy of Andre Malraux, during his period of office as Minister of Culture in the 1960s under Charles de Gaulle, represents the last attempt by the state to disseminate and democratize the classical universalist concept of culture. Since then, and especially during the 1980s when Jacques Lang was the Socialist Minister of Culture under Fran<;ois Mitterrand, the classical version of culture has been joined by a wider sociological or anthropological definition (an inheritance of post-war anti-ethnocentric anthropology and the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s) which treats culture as what people do, their customs and their life- styles. Under Lang, the state definition of Culture was transformed into cultures and embraced, in the process, not only the traditional arts but also diverse forms of popular culture, from p opular music to tagging. Ironically, this belated recognition by the state of cultural relativism and diversity did not noticeably dampen either its enthusiasm for political intervention or its obsession with the national function of culture. David Looseley has pointed up the continuities in cultural policy between the Socialist regime of the 1980s and the Gaullist regime of the 1960s, despite the evident expansion in the definition of the term: A further continuation with the de Gaulle era is this perennial preoccupation, despite all the talk of diversity and eclecticism, with fostering a national culture, visible in a host of other ways: the insistence on maintaining the state's role as harmonizer when the decentralisation laws were being implemented, the promotion of French mass culture in opposition to American, the stress on

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collective fun, and the idea of a national multiculture enshrined in the Goude procession. (Looseley 1995:241; see especially Chapter 7, pp. 135-154) Panivong Norindr (1996) traces the continuities back further still by showing how Fran<.;:ois Mitterrand's grandsprojets of the 1980s and 1990s -including especially the Louvre pyramid, the grand arch and marble cube at La Defense and the new French national library-can be viewed as part of a long-standing association (from the Second Empire redesigning of Paris via the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931) between state -inspired cultural projects and the construction of la plus grande France. Thus, in one very important sense, the traditional contextualization of cultural policy within the framework of national and social integration remained as firm as ever during the 1980s. What changed was the evolution from a concept of universal (high) Culture, to which all citizens should aspire, to a concept of diverse cultures which constituted the mosaic which was France. The latter concept has been termed (usually pejoratively) Ie culture! (or Ie tout culture~ in which more or le ss anything can count as culture. 1 The two interlinked strands of the definition of culture and the role of the state in fostering it have been major aspects of cultural debates in contemporary France. Jacques Lang's cultural policy of the 1980s was criticized mercilessly as a sign of postmodern times by those who regretted the decline of universal high culture. The most sustained assaults came from the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut (1987) and the cultural historian Marc Fumaroli (1992). Finkielkraut's book, L a Difaite de la pensee, is not aimed specifically at Lang's policies themselves (see, however, his more forthright attack on Lang in ' Finkielkraut persiste et signe: c'est la defaite de la culture!', L'Evenement du Jeudi, 19-25 April 1990) but is a historical critique of the expansion and eventual dissolution of the term 'culture' (of which Lang's policies form a part) into a meaningless relativism. Finkielkraut's depiction of the crisis of culture will be familiar to all those who have followed the general debates around culture in recent years: the decline of a notion of culture founded on the intellect, solitary reflection, meaning and a concept of "esprit (hence ' the death of thought') and the emergence of an antiintellectualist version of culture founded on an easy hedonism and instant gratification of the senses; the elevation of mass and popular cultural forms (television, rock music, fashion and so on) to the same status as classical culture (hence, to take one of Finkielkraut's examples, 'a pair of boots has the same value as Shakespeare', 1987:135); the connivance of education in this debasement, or 'dumbing down', of

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culture so that the pedagogic, social and national function of the school, so dear to the Enlightenment republican project, is jettisoned in favour of an approach which simply indulges the individualistic whims and desires of young people;2the appropriation of culture by the audiovisual media and the leisure and entertainment industries so that culture becomes indistinguishable from mass consumption; and the infantilization of society which this debasement of classical culture entails. In this scenario, May 1968 is generally depicted as the symbolic moment at which this infantilization took place. In the words of Pascal Bruckner (1996:47) 'May 68 was the moment in European history at which youth was elevated to the realm of the sages, and when it became the ideal state in opposition to adulthood.' Although informed by a similar attitude towards mass cultural pursuits as that expressed by Finkielkraut, Fumaroli engages more directly with the cultural policy of the state, not only to lambast Lang's pluriculturalist approach but also to critique Malraux's failed attempt to bring high culture to the masses through the maisons de la culture. He abhors the ways in which successive post-war governments have imposed a particular notion of culture on the people, used culture for political and propagandist ends and, in the process, not only debased culture itself but abused the freedom of individuals to choose their own forms of culture. He notes that 'state culture has more and more profoundly functionalized and commodified the Arts and, with its politico-media music-hall, has compromised them more than in any other country in the world' (Fumaroli 1992:60). A stateled democratization of culture is none other than the reduction of culture to spectacle and to consumer demand. The noble spirit of the French tradition is sullied in the process: 'Should one be surprised if a nation which carries the name of France, one of the most noble of all names, dabbles a bit in the age of democracy?' (Fumaroli 1992:27). If one can get beyond the barrage of elitist, ethnocentric and unreconstructed-humanist pronouncements which run throughout these books, their depiction of postmodern culture can be seen to connect with more serious and balanced accounts of the contemporary situation by other commentators, especially with regard to the shift from the word to the image and from the contemplative to the spectacle. These will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter (see "'The democratization" of the image'). What is of interest here, in terms of a distinctive French purchase on the contemporary debate, is the way in which national traditions (or myths?) are constructed and utilized in the formulation of a critique of postmodernism. Despite their differences, both Finkielkraut and Fumaroli offer a similar explanation for the evolution from Culture to Ie culture/, or from

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the Enlightenment classical tradition to that of postmodern multiculturalism. A major part of Finkielkraut's book is taken up with reading the history of France in terms of a binary opposition between the French universalist tradition, founded on the rationalist precepts of the Enlightenment, and the German particularist tradition, founded on the romantic notion of the Volksgeist (or spirit of the people). If the former offers emancipation from ethnic, religious or national attachment and is open to all humanity, irrespective of origins, then the latter enshrines culture in the community of origin. Finkielkraut replays the classic modern antithesis between rational free will, on the one hand, and the predetermined nature of race and environment on the other, classifying the former as French and the latter as German. In this schema, the contemporary decline of a classical version of Culture is interpreted as the infiltration of the German model of Kultur into the French tradition. Not simply is France being invaded by Germany (yet again!) but today the foreign virus is transported primarily through 'Anglo-Saxon' (meaning American) practices, for it is in 'the Anglo-Saxon world' that the heretical anthropological or sociological definition of culture now finds its quintessential form of expression. It is no surprise that Finkielkraut couples his critique of postmodern culture with a critique of multiculturalism (as we saw in Chapter 2) for, according to his simplistic and manichean divide between French universalism and German or 'Anglo-Saxon' particularism, any acceptance of particularist differences in the public sphere can be interpreted as an invasion of foreign ideas into the pure universalism of the French. 3 Fumaroli also interprets the decline of humanist culture and the rise of Ie culture! according to monolithic national models: Culture, in the sense officially recognized in France today, is a sociological and ethnological idea which derives part of its meaning from the German Kultur but none of it from the French version of civilization. Kultur, like Anglo-Saxon 'culture', has little ability to define its target because it is too wide a concept. It attempts to encompass a vague and general order of things, a hazy and impersonal collection of 'ways of thinking' or 'practices' which blurs the contours, renders objects indistinguishable and reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. The social sciences have endowed this notion with intellectual legitimacy and have provided it with its tools of analysis. (Fumaroli 1992:229)

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For Fumaroli (1992:223-224) the sociological and ethnological definition of culture which is hegemonic today clearly represents an assault on a 'certain idea' of France and French heritage (Ie patrimoine franrais), one in which la chanson had words you could understand (instead of the torrent of contemporary rock) and in which the function of the state was not to guarantee 'a social security for imported leisure pursuits' but to preside over 'the good health of its language and its education' and to guarantee 'the integration into the nation of its immigrant citizens, the moral salubrity and social amenities of its towns and the preservation of its natural environment and its countryside'. Fumaroli's vision is one in which the state has adopted a vulgarized form of culture as a new religion (or drug) aimed at diverting attention from the post-war decline of France and the loss of empire (d. Debray and Fumaroli 1993:7). In this sense, Mitterrand's grands travaux might be seen not so much as testimonies to the continuation of la plus grande France but as symbolic of its demise. In a less polemical and less nostalgic vein, Pierre Nora also puts the contemporary obsession with heritage (especially by the state) in the context of the malaises and anxieties of a crisis-ridden, post-empire France. These comprise: the feeling of having departed from the grand course of history, the 'national identity crisis' provoked by the construction of Europe, the problem of decentralization which inflicts on a very centralized, Jacobin country another form of loss of identity, immigration and the threat to the tradition of assimilation posed by a large number of foreigners who seem more difficult to 'digest'. ('Un entretien avec Pierre Nora', Le Monde, 29 November 1994) Nora's approach to this phenomenon is to reveal the symbolic import attached to society's construction of particular 'sites of memory (/ieux de memoire)' (Nora 1984). Fumaroli's approach is, on the contrary, more straightforwardly ideological. For him, the 'cultural state' is simply a perversion of the true 'French nature'. Jean-Pierre Rioux (1992:61) characterizes Fumaroli's approach as one which stereotypes contemporary cultural developments in France in terms of a mixture of an Anglo -S axon 'sociologico-anthropological' definition of culture and a German 'Hegelian-Bi smarckian' version of Kultur. Rioux contemptuously dismisses Fumaroli himself as an archaic upholder of the Enlightenment version of 'eternal France', mired for ever nostalgically in a bygone age (Rioux 1992:61). The sort of sociological revisionism of culture Fumaroli has in mind which has destroyed this French idyll, and which characterizes the mind-

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set of those who now set the cultural policy agenda, would be epitomized by the theories of Michel de Certeau and the legacy of 1968, consisting of 'social and moral stereotypes invented in Greenwich Village' (Fumaroli 1992:223). Certeau's pluralistic vision of culture converted culture from acts of genius into the acts of us all in everyday life, for culture consists not in receiving from on high but in discovering and developing the creative potential within us all (Certeau 1993:iii). This individualization and democratization of culture (culture as individual expression, or what Finkielkraut refers to as 'my culture' as opposed to Culture) is part of what Olivier Mongin (1994a: 175), among others, has termed 'the rise of identity-a highly polemical theme today because it brings together ethnic belonging, the arts, creation and aesthetic invention'. It is precisely this rediscovery of the individual subject (his or her customs, community or ' ethnic' traditions and so on, which the idealized and abstract Enlightenment philosophy of 'Man' deemed backward and parochial, cf. Touraine 1992), and the subsequent conversion of these 'anti-republican' principles into cultural policy by the soixante-huitardLeft who came to power in the 1980s, which Fumaroli and Finkielkraut interpret as an assault on the fundamental spirit and heritage of France herself. 4

Culture and society

Not only do the analyses of Finkielkraut and Fumaroli rest on a mythologized and nostalgic (not to mention elitist and ethnocentric) view of France and the Enlightenment tradition, but they also constitute a hopeless rearguard action in the face of contemporary developments. 5 Such a critique of the perspective offered by Finkielkraut and Fumaroli does not necessarily imply that, in the wake of modernity's dream of universal culture, the only option on offer today is total cultural relativism and unremitting doses of market-led kitsch and hackneyed pastiche (although this might well be the case). But it does suggest that the realities of the transformed relationship between culture and society and between art and everyday life cannot simply be wished away by a return to a lost golden age in which culture would be, in Matthew Arnold's terms, the salvation from anarchy, or that one can simply dismiss the anthropological concept of culture as 'tradition' and replace it with the pedagogical concept of culture as learning (formation or the German Bi/dung; d. Todorov 1996:180). A view which is diametrically opposed to that of Finkielkraut and Fumaroli is proposed by Gilles Lipovetsky. Although he defines a similar

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trajectory to that outlined above as regards the evolution from modernity to postmodernity, Lipovetsky sees contemporary culture not as the antithesis of the Enlightenment tradition but, on the contrary, as the logical extension of the democratization of Western societies from the Revolution onwards, and the inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment pursuit of freedom and equality. Rather than bemoaning this state of affairs (like Finkielkraut and Fumaroli), he welcomes the more democratic notion of culture which has ensued from the breakdown in the hierarchical and elitist relationship between high and popular culture. In L'Ere du vide (1983) Lipovetsky emphasizes not the differences but the similarities (at a profound rather than superficial level) between modernity and modernism. Following the thesis proposed by the conservative American political philosopher Daniel Bell in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), he suggests that modernism simply pursued the republican message (being spread liberally elsewhere during the nineteenth century) jusqu'au bout. Modernism was the cultural development of the modern democratic project to realise the sovereignty of the individual, emancipated from all external control and freed from all attachments to the past and to tradition: Whatever the intention of the artists involved, modernism should be understood as the cultural extension of the revolutionary dynamic. The analogies between the revolutionary process and the modernist project are evident: the same desire to institute a radical and irreversible break between past and present; the same devalorization of tradition .. . the same secular consecration of the new era in the name of the people, equality, the nation in one case and art itself or the new 'Man' in the other; the same obsession with extremes, the same desire to raise the stakes, either on the level of ideology and terrorism or according to the passion for extending ever further the frontiers of artistic innovation; the same desire to transcend national frontiers in the name of the universalization of the new world (epitomized by the cosmopolitan style of avantgarde art); the same constitution of groups in the forefront of change, either political activists or the artists of the avantgarde .. . [in short] modernism was the implementation of the revolutionary model in the sphere of art. (Lipovetsky 1983: 129-130)

In other words, if the Revolution killed the King who maintained the old hierarchical order, and removed God from the affairs of Man'from the law of God to the rights of the citizen', as Marcel Gauchet

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(1989:16) has said-then modernism simply explored the consequences of this new credo. In this sense, modernism was modernity's advance guard (its avant-garde), exploring a human condition no longer bound by the pre-ordained laws of a transcendent authority. Modernism was ultimately part of the same body of belief as that which inspired modernity, founded on the principles of freedom, equality and emancipation. In Lipovetsky's schema (or rather, that of Daniel Bell), postmodernism is simply the extension, or 'democratization', of the movement towards individual expression and freedom first explored by cultural modernism's avant-garde. It is the acceptance of permanent change, of radical novelty, of the equalizing and relativizing of values, and of the breakdown of the frontiers between art and the everyday. 6 Consequently, it signifies the end of 'the shock of the new': [Postmodernism is] the moment at which the avant-garde no longer incites indignation, the search for the new has become the norm, and pleasure and the stimulation of the senses have become the dominant values of society. In this sense, postmodernism is the democratization of hedonism, the universalized consecration of the New, the triumph of 'anti-institutionalism' and the end of the divorce between the values of art and those of everyday life. (Lipovetsky 1983:151) Like Daniel Bell, Lipovetsky interprets postmodernism as the sign of a more open, liberal, egalitarian and democratic society. On one level, this seems to be incontrovertible. The modernist avant-garde was a group of middle-class, bohemian and almost exclusively male intellectuals whose position in the vanguard of cultural experimentation was symbolic of an elitist and hierarchical ordering of social and cultural values. Most others (women, the working class, other minorities) were denied access to cultural practice and cultural recognition. The democratization of culture today, and the relativization of cultural values, has provided a space for a whole range of new voices and modes of expression. The blurring of the distinction between high and popular culture, and between works of the spirit and everyday life, is part of the anti-authoritarian and antihierarchical thrust of modern democratic societies which is empowering for that part of the population (the majority) who formerly occupied a subordinate position. Today the hedonism and freedom of expression formerly practised by the few is the prerogative of us all.

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However, on another level there are a number of problems with Lipovetsky's account of modernism and postmodernism. Not the least of these is the haste with which he confuses the rule of the liberal free market today with genuine pluralism and democracy. Lipovetsky's analysis implies the realization of an equality and democracy in contemporary society which might be every bit as illusory as the Utopian version of equality introduced in the era of modernity. N eo-liberal principles of democratization and egalitarianism might well mask new forms of disadvantage and inequality. As the sociologist Alain Ehrenberg (1991 :149) has pointed out, explicitly criticizing Lipovetsky's approach as typical of the woolly liberalism of a number of French intellectuals in the wake of 'the end of ideology', the appearance today of homo democraticus can be mistaken for what is, in effect, simply wider access to consumption (cf. also a similar critique of Lipovetsky's conflation of individualism and democracy by Castoriadis 1996:99).7 Furthermore, Lipovetsky's discussion also employs a very general schema for the understanding of the modern era which paints that period with very broad brush strokes indeed. His tendency to find the same principles of equality and individualism underlying modernity and its cultural offshoot, modernism (that is, traversing the social and the cultural) is to collapse one into the other with little nuance. In the process, he effaces modernism's genuinely unsettling and challenging qualities as modernity's counter-culture. Crucial to the spirit of modernity was the creation of separate spheres of human activity (between, precisely, the real and the imaginary, the social and the cultural, the public and the private, men and women, civilization and barbarity, the nation and its others, and so on) whose binary logic many modernist works delighted in transgressing. It is certainly true to say that, in the modern period, culture was deeply informed by wider social processes; but it was also profoundly questioning of them as well. s Where Lipovetsky is more interesting-and rejoins a number of other commentators on the contemporary period-is his description of postmodernism as the generalization, and hence 'banalization', of modernist techniques. The avant-garde has itself disappeared as its defining features-including hedonism, self-expression, the new and the spectacular-have become the common mode in society. The world of permanent revolution is our everyday reality, our senses are jumbled, we are dislocated in time and space, we do live each day without a safety net, we are split and fragmented, we do pursue the life of the senses in the here and now-indeed all the profoundly unsettling insights into the predicament of the human condition proclaimed by modernism are today our commonplace truths.

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In other words, society has usurped the principles of the modernist avant-garde. But, as we noted in the previous chapter, we have arrived in this place not by reading Rimbaud and Surrealism but through the changes wrought by advanced technology and mass consumer society. Today technical developments and processes of consumption have entered a new accelerated phase which has reshaped the world. We are living through what Alain Touraine termed at the end of the 1960s a post-industrial age which has profoundly destabilized our concepts of time and space and our sense of identity. In an age of order, rational planning and new rational (cognitive) spacing of the social sphere, the modernist avantgarde shocked by its brash challenge to (and aestheticization of) the logic of these processes. But today, in an age of disorder, the end of rational planning and the fragmentation of rational social spacing, the cultural reproduction of these techniques looks more like the reflection of social processes than a challenge to them. As the American critic Fredric Jameson (1984) suggested in his seminal text on the relationship between contemporary culture and society, postmodernism could just be the cultural logic of late capitalism. Although it is precisely the equivalence and conflation of culture and society which Finkielkraut, Fumaroli and others have critiqued, their desire to turn the clock back ignores the profound and irreversible shift in our societies which has taken place. Krishan Kumar puts the evolution from modernity to postmodernity in the following terms: Modernism was generally a cultural reaction to the main currents of modernity. In some of its forms it was a passionate rejection of them. The same cannot be said of the relation between postmodernism and post-industrial (or late-capitalist) society. All theorists, if they consider the relationship at all, see a convergence or complementarity between post-modern culture and postindustrial society. While therefore it may be proper to treat modernist culture as something distinct from modern society, in the sense that it represented a break or discontinuity within the general order of modernity, the same strategy cannot be applied to post-modernism. But the problem is even greater than this. For not only is it difficult to consider post-modernist culture apart from its social context; in most of the attempts to do so it is clear that much of the content of post-modernism is derived from the theory's particular understanding of contemporary society. Culture and society

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are only apparently treated separately; in reality they are collapsed into each other. (Kumar 1995:113-114) Kumar's argument suggests that the transition from industrial to post-industrial society has profoundly changed the relationship between culture and society. The cultural phenomenon of postmodernism simply cannot be extricated from the surrounding social and economic fabric of post-industrial society because the two are profoundly imbricated in a new way. Culture and society are simply indistinguishable today. This is not simply because of the commodification of culture but, as Kumar goes on to say, because culture itself is deeply implicated in the whole economic enterprise of late capitalism, to the extent that it has shifted from its former position as part of the superstructure to its present position as part of the economic base. Indeed, these terms, as Alberto Melucci observes, might no longer be appropriate for postindustrial societies: The spatial metaphors that characterized industrial culture (base vs. superstructure, centrality vs . marginality) are incre asingly inadequate in describing the workings of centre-less, and by now head-less, complex societies. The decentralization of the loci of power and conflict makes it more and more difficult to identify 'central' processes and actors. (Melucci 1996:47) (ef.Jameson 1984) The imbrication of culture and society today is, of course, part of the larger picture of the transformation of contemporary postindustrial societies. The dichotomies, hierarchies, value judgements and truths inherited from the Enlightenment have been flattened, relativized and decentred, so that the former categories separating different spheres of human activity are no longer capable of containing the more complex interconnections of processes today. And no totalizing rational principles or grand narratives can pull these dislocated pieces back into shape. The realms of art and thought (ia pensle) - indeed, knowledge itself-no longer occupy a transcendent realm over and above local beliefs but are today profoundly touched by wider developments (whether one likes it or not). Knowledge cannot be separated from the functionalist uses to which it is put for, as J ean-Fran<.;:ois Lyotard argued in his study of the postmodern condition, knowledge is no longer defined according to the old abstract criteria but is itself regulated, like any other product, by its exchange value (1979:14) and by its position

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within the complex network of 'techno-science'. In his more recent Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants (1988a), Lyotard put it like this: We cannot deny the predominance today of techno-science, that is, the reduction of cognitive statements to the rule of the best possible performance, or (in other words) the predominance of the technical criterion' (1988a:19). Knowledge has passed from the abstract world of the spirit to the everyday and purely pragmatic world of the performative, in the same way as culture in general. Given the nature of the information revolution in recent years, knowledge is not only a commodity but an integral part of the late capitalist modus operandi. Like culture, knowledge is not simply driven by the needs of capital; it is a fundamental part of the motor which drives it. 9 Perhaps the most significant aspect of the conflation of culture and society today is the effect of technological mediations of reality which have loosened our grip on a sense of the real. At the heart of the reactionary search for a golden national age (epitomized by the writings of Finkielkraut and Fumaroli) is the very genuine sense of a loss of reality brought about by the blurring of the frontiers between representation and the real. Recent French debates on this issue are an important contribution to the analysis of the inheritance of modernism's obsession with a universe of form.

The 'democratization' of the image What Walter Benjamin (1973) called 'the mechanical reproduction of reality' has entered new realms with recent advances in technology. Modernism challenged the reality principle of modern societies by undermining a sense of objective truth and highlighting the play of form and representation; p ostmodern culture-driven by more sophisticated developments in the mechanical reproduction of reality or, to use Paul Virilio's term, 'the art of the motor' (Virilio 1993) -appears to have abandoned the reality principle altogether and is immured in a virtual world of ceaseless simulacra. This feeling is at the heart of what Olivier Mongin (1994a:174) has described as the contemporary 'questioning of the very conditions of possibility of experience'. We noted in Chapter 1 how the postmodern focus on textuality and representation has dramatically transformed our apprehension and comprehension of the Holocaust. But it is also interesting to note how the sense of 'malaise' derived from the problematization of experience is very often linked to the more general crisis of the republican nation-state, for the latter is never far from the surface of the debate. A good case in point is the work of the writer and former political activist Regis Debray. Debray is a particularly acute observer of the

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transformation from modern to postmodern society (although he does not necessarily use those terms). This transformation is characterized by some of the by now familiar changes in recent times: from a belief in universal reason to a concern with individual liberty, from the pedagogy of the school to the entertainment of the television, from the political nature of the citizen to the market-led nature of the consumer. But for Debray the major framework for the contextualization of these changes is advances in the technological reproduction of reality. If modern society was founded on the word, then postmodern society is founded on the electronically transmitted image. In Debray's terms, we have passed from the era of the 'graphosphere' to that of the 'videosphere' (Debray 1993:74-75). For Debray this is a change of epistemological proportions. The ubiquitous nature of the image and the expansion of the 'mediatized market-place' (Debray 1993:98) across all spheres of political, social and cultural life have transformed society from one concerned with meaning, explanation and interpretation to one concerned with expression, information and communication. The distances that formerly separated different spheres-between the state and the individual, between the word and the world, between here and there, and so on- have been abolished so that the act of communication is all that really matters (and not the substance of what is communicated), the dissemination of information (and not the information which is disseminated). 10 We have passed from a 'civilization of the symbol' to a 'civilization of the index' (Debray 1993:31): the former consisted of codes of signification of the world while the latter abolishes the distinction between sign and referent 'to incorporate the public into the spectacle' (Debray 1993:35). In the process, we have moved from a concept of culture founded on critical distance and analysis to one founded on proximity and effusion:

In the world of the index, experience is more important than analysis. The first is physical, the second intellectual. Experience and first-person enunciation is immediate, live, 'hot'; analysis and impersonal statement are pre-recorded, removed from context, 'cold'. In the 'videosphere', the act of communication is more important than the content, and the act of enunciation counts for more than the statement enounced. What is fundamental is contact not discourse. (Debray 1993:127) 11

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The age of the 'videosphere' has installed a new reality- '[the civilization of the index] has not simply modified our access to the real, it has become another reality' (Debray 1993:31) - one which can be apprehended instantly and without recourse to interpretation, for there is now no longer any distinction between the medium and what is represented. Subject and object are fused, the illusion of direct apprehension made palpable, the boundaries between event and spectator, performer and audience, abolished through the instantaneous nature of the electronically produced message. Mongin (1993:105) remarks on the 'perverse effect' of the ' communication society': 'On the one hand, it provides a present with out history, a self- sufficient pre sent, and on the other hand it establishes a direct relation between communicants at the expense of all mediation.' In the political sphere, the distinctions between politicians and 'the people', and between political programmes and 'public opinion' are being progressively effaced. It is no longer a question of 'we will give you what's good for yo u' but 'we will give you what you want' because I am you and you are me. Martin Jacques has suggested that sport has become the clearest example of this process of identification which characterizes the new 'democracy': 'There is a continuum between star and punter; we are all enfranchised, it is a democratic activity. This makes the stars peculiarly accessible. They are people we can relate to and identify with' ('Worshipping the body at the altar of sport', Observer, 13 July 1997).12 In his analyses of the links between sport, democracy and identity, Alain Ehrenberg would surely endorse this statement while underlining the fact that this identification of 's tar and punter' is a p otent indicator of the anxious quest for equality, excellence and individual value in societies traversed by inequalities and the breakdown of collective values (cf. Ehrenberg 1988). This form of identification accompanies the blurring of spectacle and life in the democratization of contemporary societies. In his book Les S tars, the sociologist Edgar Morin had already remarked on the confusion between the two as long ago as 1957. In the preface to the 1972 edition of this book, he states: ' the mythology of stars is situated in a mixed and confused zone between belief and entertainment.' Today that zone has become even more 'mixed and confused'. This blurring of boundaries, the disappearance of reality into a world of simulations (which do not announce that they are images of the world but state simply 'we are the world'), underpinned by the advances in electronic mass media and information technology, clearly has much in common with Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the death of meaning, the destruction of the social and the ubiquitous nature of simulacra in

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contemporary society. Baudrillard's work has progressively moved towards a rejection of the Marxist distinction between economic structures and phenomenal forms (base and superstructure), and between regimes of truth and appearance. The commodification of the social order has destroyed the Enlightenment distinction between object and representation and created a depthless world of simulacra or, in Baudrillard's terms, 'hyperreality', whose function, as Steven Connor (1989:57) observes, is to be 'more real than reality itself' (or 'realler than real', Kellner 1989:82). This ceaseless world of commodified simulations, which is our lot in postmodern times, endlessly stimulates and seduces us but deprives us of any means to step outside its tyrannical rule (as the distinction between inside and outside no longer exists), and neutralizes all attempts at political contestation. Baudrillard's later work takes Jameson's theories on the dissolution of the distinction between socio-economic life and cultural forms to an extreme in which all boundaries (between, for example, reality and illusion, subject and object, theory and practice) have been collapsed into the smooth space of simulation. Georges Balandier offers a very similar analysis of the convergence of reality and illusion through advanced technology, and the corresponding disappearance of culture beneath the uniform rule of the image: Technical advances consume nature and the profusion of images swallows up culture. The configurations of today's world are constituted by this excess of images and the accompanying flow of words and sounds. They shape the world and transform it into a hyper-world. They sweep up everything in their movement, abolishing all links with a transcendent meaning and obscuring the fixed points of reality which orient our paths through life. (Balandier 1994:137) Debray employs a far more explicit national framework for the understanding of these developments. Audio-visual culture, which has replaced a word-based culture, is not simply the sign of the 'passivization' of the individual, forced to respond uncritically to the barrage of stimuli spewed out unremittingly day after day (cf. Finkielkraut's description of the 'zombie' in La Difaite de la pensle); it is also the sign of the passage from a republican to a democratic ethos, from 'republican distancing' to 'the ideal of democratic effusion' (Debray 1993:34; see also Debray 1989). The former is associated directly with the French Enlightenment national tradition, the latter with the contemporary globalization (or, more accurately, Americanization) of

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post-industrial societies. Debray uses the antithesis between republic and democracy in the same way that Finkielkraut and Fumaroli use the antithesis between France and 'the Anglo -Saxon world'. Profoundly attached to the value s of French republicanism, Debray therefore interprets the democratization of culture through the audio-visual media as antithetical to the French model of the nation-state: 'The arts which one could define as of national interest, in that they are coded by a language (theatre, literature, poetry), have given way to arts of world interest, in that they are not linguistically coded (music, dance, visual media in general), (Debray 1993:50) Y This national framing of the evolution from the word to the image is shared by a number of other French commentators. For example, Balandier (1992:147) maintains, like Debray, that 'the process of democracy requires a pedagogy of the image. The image is as intrinsic an element in contemporary democracy as were reading and writing in the founding of the republican school and the Republic in general'. Paul Virilio sees this 'democratization' of the image in apocalyptic terms. In L'Art du moteur (1993) he suggests that the developments in technological mediations of reality have affected our perceptions of time and space in such profound ways that we are no longer able to appreciate the extent to which our notions of the real have been altered: Acceleration has effaced the distinction between here and there. All that is left is a mental confusion of near and far, present and future and real and unreal. What we have today is the mixing of history, of histories, and the hallucinating Utopia implanted by techniques of communication. (Virilio 1993:55) Paradoxically, the more sophisticated the technological mediation of reality, the less we can actually 'see'; the more images there are, the less skilled we become in using our imagination. 14 At the end of his book Vie et Mort de l'image (1992:499), Debray outlines the frightening prospect that today's era of the dominance of visual culture (ie visuel) - in which the world is instantly accessible and visible, as if unmediated -installs a new regime of truth: 'the Visible=the Real=the Truth'. All former civilizations believed that the image prevented seeing: we are the first civilization to reverse this formula. In the process, we are witnessing the death of the image. As Mongin (1994a:219-220) says, ' an image without a world is the sign of the hegemony of the visual but also a sign of the death of the image for the distinction between inside and outside has been abolished'. Alain Ehrenberg, on the other

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hand, is more open to the new possibilities offered by the electronic transformation of reality. He wonders whether recent developments should be interpreted as a crisis in looking at the world or simply as a change to our habitual ways of looking (1995:285; d. the special section entitled 'Vices et vertus de l'image' in Esprit 1994). For Ehrenberg, virtual reality has the potential for opening up new spaces for imaginative interaction in the same way as certain drugs, although without the negative effects (1995:290). Yet he is careful to avoid any unconditional celebration of cyberspace, for it reflects both the possibilities and the anxieties of individuals in an 'uncertain' age. Paul Virilio believes that the germs of the above paradox-namely, that the era of Ie visuel is the era of the death of the image and the death of seeing- were there at the very beginning of the electronic revolution: From the beginning of the electronic revolution, the production of images destroyed a static organisation and, correspondingly, the restfulness of vision and the tranquillity of enlightened contemplation .. .and created a visual misinformation which would soon reduce the procedures of representation and communication to their simplest forms. (Virilio 1993:97) For Virilio, 'video-graphic tyranny' (1993:102) is a new form of control far worse than state-run propaganda and misinformation. He believes that the dictatorship of the image heralds the demise of threedimensional 'Man': Seeing the world presupposes a depth of field of vision. If the world is flattened and crushed it loses this depth and we lose our depth of action and reflection. We become two-dimensional. That is what the rule of the screen really means. (Virilio 1996:103) Tzvetan Todorov (1996:179) adopts a similarly apocalyptic tone when he observes that 'the monotony of images transmitted by the media deprives us of our freedom and therefore even our identity'. Cornelius Castoriadis has also castigated the new 'democratization' of culture. He suggests that the result of 'consumer-telly' is a passivization of the individual and an obliteration of choice by a new mass conformism: 'I maintain that we are living through the most conformist phase of modern history' (1994:48; d. Le Goff 1996:219). In his eyes, the

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'arrogant' and 'stupid' theories of postmodernism merely give credence to what is, in effect, a realization of 'the most pessimistic prophecies that we have received, from Tocqueville and the "mediocrity" of the "democratic" individual, to Nietzsche and nihilism .. .up to Spengler, Heidegger and after' (Castoriadis 1994:49). Virilio suggests that this immunization against experience by the technological virtualization of reality can only be countered by a return to writing and a recreation of the 'art of the eco' (Conley 1996) .1 5 Balandier also suggests that only the written word can provide the critical detachment from lived experience necessary for any genuine democratic life, for the simultaneity of the image encourages merely emotional affinity and is, by necessity, simplifying and impoverishing (Balandier 1994:207). However, Regis Debray is far more sceptical of turning back the clock. He is conscious of the irrevocable interpenetrati ons of culture and society discussed above, and hence the impossibility of rediscovering a 'pure' space of seeing, talking and writing which is untainted by the electronic information networks of our age. As he says, 'in reality, information and belief are interrelated' (1993:69; see al so Debray 1994:70 and Mourier, ed., 1989). In his excellent introduction to the work of Regis Debray for an English-speaking audience, Keith Reader notes the difficulty in determining to what extent Debray 'is analytic ally accounting for the inevitable erosion of the imagination by the image or lodging a romantic protest against it'. I would suggest that Debray's response is usually a mixture of the two, 'the detached analyst and the concerned individual' (Reader 1995:64; for a further discussion of Debray's recent work, see also the contributions in 'Identification d'un objet: la mediologie' in Le Dibat 1995). Whatever the reaction to current trends, one can detect common strands running through the writings of a number of the French commentators mentioned above: the breakdown in the distinctions between culture and everyday life and between the real and the image, and the decline of the written word and the republic in favour of the image and democracy, respectively, invariably run in tandem with an apocalyptic vision of the decline of the French 'model' of the nation. For some this is simply presented as a statement of fact. For others, it is part of a general critique of postmodern society and a nostalgic idealization of republican France, depicted as victim to the influence of foreign ideas and practices. For the latter, the ideas prevalent in the 1960s and those that informed structuralism and post-structuralism are the usual culprits for this departure from the rational humanism of the French republican tradition.

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But even when this reactionary and nostalgic element is less visible, one can often detect a distaste for 'democratization' among French intellectuals. Democracy signifies the flattening and equivalence of the hierarchical distinctions which informed the republican model. It is a pick-and-mix and relativist multiculturalism which reduces real diversity to the same bland formula of market-led personal taste and individual desire, and in which it becomes impossible to distinguish or 'make sense of' anything at all. It is an individualistic interpellation of ' the people', a form of populism, which appeals to the base instincts of the masses; this is diametrically opposed to the republican moulding of Ie peuple into a homogeneous whole through an uplifting concept of culture and civilization. 16 Historically, it is therefore associated (as we have seen) with the German romantic tradition of the Volk and the anthropological definition of culture, as opposed to the French Enlightenment and classical tradition of Ie peuple, and receives all the opprobrium that the former tradition has attracted from a stream of French intellectuals over the decades. 17 Yet it is also profoundly informed by the ambivalent reaction to American mass culture which has characterized the modernization of France from at least the 1950s. On the one hand, American-style economic practices and cultural forms were embraced enthusiastically by an administrative class and people respectively, keen to enter the modern world in the post-war reconstruction of the country. On the other hand, the brashness of the changes wrought (especially in the cities) and the associations made between new technology, mass culture and mass consumption were often viewed negatively as a new enslavement of France. The films of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s are a good example of this ambiguous response, for they frequently demonstrate both a fascination with and demonization of the Americanization of French culture, which is seen both as a force of liberation and democratization and as a neo-colonization of France (d. Ross 1995). More recently, the transformation of museums of 'high culture' (the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay) into cultural supermarkets, in which the trappings of commercialized mass culture are to the fore, is a further example of the tension between democratization and consumerism, the preservation of French national culture and enslavement to the norms of American mass culture (d. Pugh 1997). 'Democratization' therefore has an ambivalent status, but in French intellectual life is often associated with a pejorative view of 'the popular' and 'the mass'. Olivier Mongin has remarked on this tendency in the following way:

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The rejection of democracy is a very powerful force among French intellectuals. Whether they are conservatives or progressives, they have always seen the 'demos', the p opulace, either as the masses wh o have gone astray or as cattle with fascist tendencies. This contempt for the democrat and for the 'person in the street' remains very real at a time when the accusation of nationalism is used to discredit any opinion, by intellectuals for whom 'opinion' is usually seen as the most extreme form of ignorance and stupidity. (Mongin 1994b:63) This pejorative conflation of democracy, popular culture and the masses, to which Mongin refers, has its equivalents in Britain but would be dismissed by many as simply a sign of an elitist and reactionary position. However, in France it would be wrong to dismiss it in the same way for, as Mongin points out, conservatives and radicals have shared this opinion. It is, to a large extent, the power of the republican Enlightenment tradition and its elites, the strength of the State and the relative 'poverty of civil society' (Mine 1995:66; cf. Chapter 5) that explains how 'the popular', popular culture and democracy have often been conflated in this pejorative way. 18 It is therefore no surprise that what Jim McGuigan (1992) calls 'cultural populism' - which has significantly informed the British cultural studies tradition-does not have its direct equivalent in France, where ideas of popular culture have been fostered within a different overall context on culture in general (cf. Rigby 1991, Looseley 1995). This difference helps to explain why the anthropological and sociological definition of culture is often seen by French commentators as an 'Anglo -Saxon' (or German) invention. However, 'national models' are always constructions which simplify the messy nature of reality. As we have seen, 'cultural populism' also has its advocates in France (see, for example, Lipovetsky 1987, Yonnet 1985), and there are as many problems with their 'uncritical populist drift' (McGuigan 1992:5) as with the 'critical populist drift' outlined above. An uncritical celebration of the everyday pursuits of ordinary people (see, for example, in Britain the ethnographic work of Paul Willis) is frequently anti-intellectualist, has no mechanism for critiquing the 'nastier' aspects of everyday life (for example, popular racism), fails to view the interconnections between 'everyday life', popular culture and wider economic and socia l determinations (for example, the inseparability today of popular and advertising culture; cf. Pugh 1997:167), and can simply reinforce a liberal free-market economic perspective by implicitly endorsing the rights of the consumer.

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Caught between (republican) critique and (democratic) celebration, French commentators on contemporary culture (like those elsewhere) are uncertain of the definition of culture today, and its status and function. This uncertainty spreads to the role of intellectuals in defining and commenting on the nature of culture today. The final section in this chapter considers these wider aspects of recent cultural debates.

Culture, counter-culture and intellectuals

Even though the debate around postmodern culture in France often takes place within the partisan context of the republic versus democracy, and within a long French tradition of scepticism towards mass popular culture, we should not, for all that, underestimate the genuine fears and unease expressed by a diverse range of commentators on the nature of culture today. For the convergence of culture and society and the democratization of culture under the banner of a vigorous and (since the end of communism) triumphant phase of capitalism have put in question not only the distinctions between high, popular and mass culture and the values of the Enlightenment, but also the radical tradition of political, subversive or marginal counter-cultural forms whose very existence challenged the status quo. In Chapter 3 we touched on this issue in terms of the aestheticization of the social domain and the consequent conversion of the jlaneur into the customer. I should like to pursue this question here, paying particular attention to the way in which these developments have affected concepts of culture and the intellectual. If it is true, as Fredric Jameson (1984) has suggested, that eclectic postmodern culture is none other than the 'cultural logic' of late capitalism, then this would suggest that not only has the modernist avant-garde critique of modern society been blunted (as we suggested in the second section of this chapter) but that other non-elitist suband counter-cultures have also been absorbed into the mainstream, in which case cultural practices which were radical in the past have been transformed from industrial society's bete noire into the house style of post-industrial society. We need only think of the ways in which the modernist techniques of fragmentation, juxtaposition, montage and self-reflexivity-all of which unsettled views of reality and challenged a conventional sense of time, space and identity-are now employed liberally in advertising and pop videos to promote products for consumption. Do these techniques shock us any more, or have we been so over-exposed to 'the new' that they are now more likely to be received

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with a yawn than a frisson? Is it possible today to tell the difference between the techniques of advertising and those used in numerous films, in view of the fact that they not only resemble each other formally but are often made by the same people? Or would we agree with Adrian Searle ('Art and politics don't mix', Guardian, 25 February 1997) when he states, in relation to the photomontage technique of Peter Kennard, that 'we have seen too many such "subversive" images for them to be effective, and what was once a radical technique has become part of the mainstream media lexic on'? Lip ovetsky (1987: 321) suggests that the built-in obsole scence of artistic experimentation today and the ceaseless coming and going of new artists have converted the artistic sphere into a 'theatre of frivolous revolution which shocks nobody'. The debate around the cinema du look or 'new new wave' film directors of the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Leos Carax, highlights this point. Are films like Diva (1981), Le Grand Bleu (1988) and Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1990) simpl y 'spectacular publicity sequences' (Russell 1989/1990:46) whose sole raison d'etre is as a visual spectacle for the purpose of seduction (Frodon 1995:575), 'the image for and of itself' (Hayward 1993:247; see also Hayward 1987)? Has the cinema simply become the reflection of the consumer society of spectacle rather than its ideological critic (i la Godard)? Or does it still engage in defamiliarization and critique while trawling through the eclectic visual and aural vocabulary which constitutes contemporary cultures? David Russell (1989/1990:47) situate s Beineix at the crossroads of a number of convergences in contemporary culture: 'Just as [Beineix] is at the forefront of the postmodern dialogue between publicity and cinema, comic strip s and narrative, opera and thriller, high and low art forms, so he is also part of the great European-American cinematic debate.' Yet the role he plays in this dialogue and debate remains controversial: is it simply as an agent of pick-and-mix postmodern eclecticism and pastiche, or is it as a serious commentator on the relationship between culture and society today? The former response would suggest that the techniques of intertextuality, 'recycled materials' (Bassan 1989:49), and the play of image and sound at the heart of postmodern culture herald the end of counter-cultures. If the ultimate sign of anti-conformism today is the democratization and repetition of techniques whose radical cutting-edge is long past its sell-by date, or, alternately, to display a Nike logo on your footwear (in imitation of the 'bad boys' and 'antiheroes' of the world of sport) then counter-culture is indeed doomed.

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As Sami Nair remarks (Morin and Nair 1997:226), 'today, even radical art fails to disturb the all-encompassing conformism. Commodification has swallowed up everything.' The ideas expressed by Baudrillard, Debray and others on the implosion of meaning and the collapse of 'the real' into depthless surfaces and endless simulacra would tend to reinforce the notion of the end of counter-cultures. As we have seen, the subversive or transgressive nature of modernist techniques was linked to a tension between a concept of the real (very much still in place in the positivist and rationalist climate of the nineteenth century) and self-reflexive forms of representation. But if, today, we have lost a sense of the real and a sense of experience, if, that is, art has simply given up on notions of the 'real' and 'experience' to indulge in pure self-reflexivity and parody, then the tension in the modern era which produced modernism no longer exists and self-referentiality (having become the norm) is no longer challenging. As Michael Collins says in relation to ironic comedy on television: Irony has become to television what the installation has become to the art world. A concept that came up on the outside, and once kicked against the pricks, now lays the flagstones for a new orthodoxy ... the trouble with an insurrection is that you can't keep it up. ('You must be joking', Guardian, 14 July 1997) How can we be unsettled today if we are no longer able to tell the difference between reality and image? How can we be shocked if we have become anaesthetized against the real by the ceaseless bombardment of images? If everything exists (or appears to exist) on the same plane, the subversion of hierarchies becomes a contradiction in terms. Postmodernism would therefore be the depoliticization of culture. Despite his fairly uncritical celebration of postmodernism, Gilles Lipovetsky underlines this very point when he describes the 1960s (once again quoting the argument of Daniel Bell) as the moment at which the radical nature of modernism gives way to the depoliticized mass hedonism of postmodernism: The sixties were a beginning and an end. They signal the end of modernism, the final manifestation of the offensive launched against puritan and utilitarian values, the ultimate movement of cultural revolt (this time a mass movement). But they also signal the beginning of a postmodern culture, that is, a culture which

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does not innovate and with no real daring, which is simply a democratization of the logic of hedonism and an extension of the process of privileging 'the basest tendencies rather than the most noble'. (Lipovetsky 1983:151-152; see also Lipovetsky 1987:288-291) This ambivalent epitaph to the 1960s is probably a more accurate reflection of the different tendencies which informed that decade than those descriptions which simply celebrate the movements of subversion of order and liberation through carnival. Margaret Atack (1997: 296) puts May 1968 firmly within the ambivalent hinterland between liberation and commodification, and between 'reality' and representation: 'Was May 1968 a great battle against the consumer society or did it show that in the society of spectacle, social protest itself was now appropriated as a consumer product?' (see also Jill Forbes on the nature of carnival in Forbes and Kelly 1995:247). Atack suggests that the commodification of social relations through imageproduction is at the heart of a number of fictional critiques of the new mass culture of 1960s consumer society (Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles images) 1966, or Georges Perec's Les Choses) 1965), as well as sociological critiques (Edgar Morin's Les Stars) 1957, and Guy Debord's La S ociiti du spectacle) 1967). Since the 1960s, the advance of the image-production of reality of consumer societies has continued apace. In the process, countercultures have become less and less distinguishable from the allembracing market which dominates our lives. What Beauvoir saw as the task of demystifying the commodification of the image to reveal a reality full of jagged rather than smooth edges, and what the Situationists saw as the inherent contradictions of the 'society of spectacle' which opened up spaces of resistance to and subversion of capitalist society, Baudrillard has retheorized as the total appropriation of the real by the spectacle and, consequently, the end of all possibility of transgression and subversion. According to Baudrillard (1997:183), the decline of any aesthetic principle today springs not from 'the extinction of art but from aesthetic saturation'; the democratization of creativity inherited from the 1960s (we are all creators) has led, paradoxically to the demise of creation itself. Sadie Plant's attempt to reinvigorate Baudrillard's jaded perspective by reviving the liberationist and optimistic potential of the vision of the Situationists, and her effort ' to reintroduce some sense of meaning, purpose and passion to a postmodern discourse of futile denial' (Plant 1992:183) are admirable in principle but perhaps insufficient on their

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own as a critique of the 'dumbing down' of cultural radicalism today and the commodification of culture upon which it is premised. Even Castoriadis, an avowed opponent of the decline of the radical and critical tradition of culture and criticism (and the role of intellectuals), is pessimistic about current trends in the light of aggressive commodification and the effect of the media: The word 'revolutionary' -like the words ' creation' or 'imagination' -has become a publicity slogan. This is what a few years ago was termed 'recuperation'. Marginality has become something to be sought after and has moved to the centre; subversion has become an interesting curiosity which rounds off the harmony of the system. Contemporary society has a frightening capacity to smother all real divergence from the norm, either by silencing it or by transforming it into a phenomenon like all others, commodified like all others. (Castoriadis 1996:86-87) Castoriadis' analysis is a depressing assessment of current trends. It gives rise to a fundamental question raised by numerous other commentators on cultural and social developments: in an age of mass consumption, has the social function of culture simply given way to an aesthetic function, itself swallowed up by the insatiable appetite of commodity capitalism? If this is indeed the case, then we must agree that culture is no longer propelled by a concept of Ie beau or by a concept of critical engagement with and subversion of the status quo, but simply by the criteria of sensation, pleasure, entertainment and leisure, and driven ultimately by market forces. Seduction through spectacle has replaced striving for superior knowledge, contemplation in tranquillity or critical engagement through defamiliarization. As Steven Connor says (1989:47) in relation to Jameson's theories of postmodernism and consumer society 'no means seem to be available to separate culture from everything else, and there is greatly reduced scope for claiming that within culture there may be ways of thwarting the inexorable rhythms of appropriation and alienation of consumer capitalism'. If this is true then critical purchase on social norms has been abolished and its explanatory framework for the demystification of capitalism's modes of alienation recuperated as simply another form of representation. Cultural practitioners and critics have consequently been converted from crusaders whose mission is to unmask the hidden laws of alienating consumer society into tourists on a pre-packaged

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holiday. As Jean-Joseph Goux h as remarked, salvation and liberation through art are simply no longer on the cards: For three-quarters of a century now, art itself has, more often than not, renounced .. . the task of idealist compensation assigned to it by Hegel. All it can do is recognize the very process which has rendered it less and le ss signific ant. (Goux 1994:107-108) Fran<;ois Hers and Bernard Latarjet describe how this might be a totally new phase in the history of art which signals dangers of all sorts: Despite its apparent fecundity, contemporary art has become more and more a self-referential practice. Cut off from any transcendent function, it has lost its role as a medium. Artists and those responsible for the dissemination of their works find it difficult to specify which essential needs of society are catered for by their practice .. .. Society itself has also become incapable of judging.... The current confusion could leave the way clear for the market to be the only social arbiter of what qualifies as art and what does not. This is hardly its role. (Hers and Latarjet 1990:301) The conclusion drawn by Hers and Latarjet, that the decision as to the function of art cannot simply be left to the market, is shared by a number of commentators of different persuasions, although their solutions (if offered at all) diverge. It is precisely the danger of the commodification of culture that has led Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard, for example, to proclaim that cultural practice must, in the final analysis, resist all attempts at recuperation. His notion of 'the sublime' is that which is beyond naming and appropriation. For Lyotard, it is only by keeping alive the radical cutting edge of modernism-its problematization of language and representation-that we can preempt 'closure' and recuperation. Postmodern culture should therefore, ironically, be driven by the very spirit guiding modernism before it was colonized, anaesthetized and sanitized by capitalism: namely, the selfreflexive and open-ended search for forms which refuse representation but instead gesture obliquely towards the ineffable nature of 'the other' and the world. Julia Kristeva's description of the fleeting nature of ' the stranger' (his/ her 'strangeness') gestures towards the same vision:

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Let us not seek to fix the strangeness of the stranger or turn it into an object. Let us just touch it, skim it lightly, without giving it any definitive structure. Let us simply sketch the perpetual movement of some of its many different faces which pass before our eyes today. (Kristeva 1988:11) However, this is an exercise fraught with difficulty, given that the processes of fragmentation, self-reflexivity and ceaseless reinventionthe very processes which Lyotard promotes as a means of problematizing closure, unity and totality-are those same processes exploited mercilessly by the new designers and the market. Indeed, some have suggested that Lyotard's emphasis on the absence of any privileged position from which to judge the plurality of language games and truth regimes in contemporary society provides the perfect rationale for the rule of unrestrained (and unethical) relativist liberalism (cf. Norris 1993). Feminism presents perhaps the clearest example of this narrow line between subversion and recuperation, between marginality (or 'liminality') and the mainstream. The works of Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, for example, have all, in different ways, opened up radical spaces of contestation of the patriarchal dichotomies of modernity (Moi 1985), and might therefore be seen as exemplary of postmodern difference and the irrecuperable nature of 'the other'. However, if it is true that power is no longer located in centralized and (relatively) homogeneous institutions (for example, the state) but is dispersed in multiple local and global formations and on multiple micro and macro levels, then the distinction between the centre and the margins no longer holds in the same way today, and spaces of resistance and radical marginality become difficult places to inhabit for any length of time. The celebration and commodification of nomadism, difference and otherness that we discussed in relation to 'the Jew' in Chapter 1 and the jldneur in Chapter 3, and which can also be applied to 'woman' as other to 'male' rationality, can quickly nullify the subversive impact or 'radical openness' (hooks 1991 :149) of cultural difference, of l'etrangete, and reappropriate it for the market, thereby obliterating the radical potential of feminist sexual politics. 19 Philippe Sollers has suggested (with tongue in cheek) that-given that the opposition between the centre and the margins (or any opposition for that matter) has been abolished-'the best way to be on the margins in a system which devours everything is to be at the centre .. . . The subversive act par excellence is the avoidance of marginalization' (quoted in Mongin 1994a:233).20 This is not unlike

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Baudrillard's notion that, according to Bauman's resume (1992:153), 'the bovine immobility of the masses is the best form of activity we have, and that their doing nothing is the most excellent form of resistance'. The (ironic?) suggestion that 'the apathy of the masses can be seen as a "strategic resistance'" (Kellner 1989:89) is an indication of the profound cynicism which has marked approaches to political activity since the radical politics of the 1960s. These are the responses of intellectuals for whom the melting down of all that was solid (Berman 1982) and the disappearance of boundaries signifies the impossibility of old forms of subversion. On the other hand, unreconstructed humanists like Alain Finkielkraut and Marc Fumaroli offer an equally problematic solution to the market logic of postmodern culture. They wish to cling on to the Enlightenment link between culture as a set of universal values to which humanity must aspire and the organic role of the intellectual in bringing this about. In La Difaite de fa pensee (1987), Finkielkraut explicitly places his text in the context of Julien Benda's famous work on La Trahison des clem (1977; first published 1927), in which Benda berates those intellectuals who have adopted partisan ideologies and abandoned the universalist principles of humanity (cf. also Finkielkraut 1996:65-67). According to Finkielkraut, today's intellectuals have similarly 'sold out' the pursuit of reason, truth and justice and joined the pleasure-seeking masses by embracing market-driven cultural relativism. Fumaroli adopts a similar stance and believes that, instead of merely accepting the impoverishment of culture, intellectuals should playa role of 'reorientation and resistance' (Debray and Fumaroli 1993:14). Both want to reinstate the Enlightenment link between learning and teaching (hence the centrality of the school in republican critiques of postmodern culture).21 Theirs is an Arnoldian concept founded on the Enlightenment distinction between culture and anarchy which views postmodern culture, in George Steiner's terms, as 'a post-cultural condition' (d. Bauman 1992:34). However, if Matthew Arnold could preach with the certainty and self-confidence that came with Western domination of the rest of the world (when Western culture was universal culture), today's imitators of Arnold sound more like the defensive guardians of a parochialism which, ironically, Arnold himself would have abhorred. Postmodern relativism has transformed old-style cultural crusaders into elitist and ethnocentric pedants. Furthermore, it has left their ideas on the crusading role of intellectuals as hopelessly outdated. Intellectuals today are no longer armed with the certainty of a transcendent version of truth which propelled them into the vanguard of modernity's crusade

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for freedom, justice and progress (d. Silverman 1994). With the end of grand narratives, the demise of the heady ideologies of modernity, the decentring of the West, and the rise of mass audiovisual culture, the intellectual's voice (like the transcendent position of classical culture itself) has been relativized. Does the contemporary collapse of hierarchies signal the death of the intellectual, since the latter's existence as prophet and political and cultural crusader depended on a transcendent realm and the distinction between theory and practice which have now disappeared? In Zygmunt Bauman's terms (1987), the passage from modernity to postmodernity has been accompanied by the transformation of the intellectual from legislator to interpreter. If, formerly, the intellectual acted as the legitimizing and proselytizing authority for the modern universalist ideals of freedom and progress, today the intellectual's task is a far more modest one of interpreting between different 'language communities'. They are now bound by the differentialist and pluralist ethos of the age and therefore speak, inevitably, from within a particular tradition rather than proclaim universal truths (given that it is now understood that universalism was always only ever a particularism). In other words, the interpreter (unlike the legislator) implicitly recognizes the fact that knowledge is always 'situated'. At the same time that culture loosened its ties with the grand humanist project of social engineering, so many intellectuals have progressively dropped their view of culture as a social task to be accomplished in favour of the anthropological notion of culture as an attribute to be celebrated. In an early issue of the journal Le Dibat, Pierre Nora confirmed the changed status of the intellectual by suggesting that 'the reign of the superior thinker is coming to an end' (quoted in Peters 1993:94). Lyotard's work has for long advocated this more modest role for intellectuals, in the context of the absence of any overall authority: It is probable now and for the foreseeable future [that] we, as philosophers, as much as we may be concerned by politics (and inevitably we are so concerned), are no longer in a position to say publicly: 'Here is what you must do.' .. . This is not to say that there are no longer any intellectuals, but today's intellectuals, philosophers in so far as they are concerned by politics and by questions of community, are no longer able to take up obvious and pellucid positions: they cannot speak in the name of an 'unquestionable' universality. (cited in Smart 1993:37) 22

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The proliferation, in recent years, of works on the intellectual (see, for example, Mongin 1994a, Rieffel 1993, Schiffer 1995, Sirinelli 1990, Spire 1996; see also the dossier entitled 'La Ve Republique des clercs' in Le Dibat 1994) might itself be symptomatic of the demise of a tradition which was intricately connected to the abstract ideologies of the Enlightenment and their embodiment within the republican state (Macey 1995:124). One tendency which clearly emerges from the current obsession with the intellectual is a revisionist one. Intellectual history is revisited in order to castigate the abstract ideological dogmatism and moral blindness of past gurus (see, for example, Levy 1987 and Judt 1992), and hence to clear the way for a more 'sensible' return to the individual in the form of a neo-liberalism and celebration of Western democracy (as announced in the 'end of history' thesis proposed by Francis Fukuyama). As Castoriadis has observed, now that the totalitarian regimes have crumbled and MarxismLeninism has been destroyed, the majority of Western intellectuals now pass their time glorifying the Western regimes as 'democratic', not ideal perhaps .. .but the best humanly possible, and suggesting at the same time that any criticism of this pseudo-democracy leads right back to the Gulag. (Castoriadis 1996:85) However, this revisionism should not necessarily be confused with the more general change in status and function of the intellectual outlined above. The postmodern condition does not inevitably (one hopes) lead to an unconditional neo-liberalism. It means, instead, a different way of talking to others and a different type of political engagement. What, then, is the role of the intellectual in a postmodern age? Is the post-cultural and post-ideological age necessarily the postintellectual age as well, or does it simply signify a different type of intellectual activity? This decentred figure can no longer occupy the moral high ground, can no longer speak with the voice of authority, can no longer 'legislate' in the same way as in the past. An absence of centre means an anxious quest rather than a confident and messianic proclamation. The postmodern intellectual is conscious of the 'end of grand narratives', conscious of the fragile and contingent nature of his or her voice, and conscious of the fact that it is one voice (itself ambivalent) jostling with others rather than speaking for them. The words which mobilized intellectuals in the past-involvement, responsibility, commitment, morality, and so on-may not be completely redundant

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today but may simply have taken on new meanings in a changed context. Today they find themselves in a deregulated and deinstitutionalized age: that is, an age in which they can no longer be swallowed up by overarching grand narratives, mass social movements or a strong nationally oriented state, all of which, in their way, channelled these terms-and channelled identity-into their own projects. Today, as Michael Walzer has said, 'morality is something we have to argue about' (quoted in Weeks 1993:195). Jacques Derrida (1992) maintains that a recognition of our changed environment necessitates a redefinition of the intellectual: The complex game of new tele-technologies and the transformations of public space demand new responsibilities. We can no longer talk in the same way as we did before. And if I am not being too ambitious here, I would like to call for the creation of a new type of intellectual, one who would be prepared to free him/herself from all the norms of institutionalized readings, discourses and modes of intervention. (Derrida 1992:53) The deregulation of the intellectual does not necessarily mean the death of the intellectual, as Lyotard points out above; simply the necessity to reconsider his or her function in a transformed landscape. Might we then agree with Georges Balandier when he talks of the fragmentation of the intellectual milieu in the following way: Passions grow weaker with the loss of certainties, pluralism of ideas accompanies the 'compromise' with the market, and the 'logic of the spectacular' is the order of the day; but the space for intellectual activity is being reconfigured and the process of decline could well be reversed. ('A la recherche des intellectuels disparus', Le Monde des Livres) 22 October 1993, p. 31) The intellectual adventure is being reshaped today according to the constraints of a postmodern cultural topography.

5

Citizens all?

The concept of citizenship which emerged from Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution was founded on an abstract humanism, on the separation between the particular and the universal and between the private and the public spheres, on the pedagogic function of the state and on the republican model of the nation. This Utopian dream of creating a uniform, egalitarian and neutral space, underpinned by rational order and elevated beyond the realm of individual belief, was pursued more rigorously in France than in any other country. Little surprise, then, that in France, living in the wake of modernity signifies (possibly above all else) a profound crisis in the modern concept of 'the community of citizens' (cf. Schnapper 1994). The hierarchically organized dichotomies on which that concept was founded have today been undermined: the public citizen has become increasingly confused with the private individual. And as the market appears to sweep all before it-exploiting that fragmentation of the uniform public sphere into different cultural identities-the very idea of the social and the public has been thrown into question. A general air of malaise thus pervades political and intellectual life. Yet there are also signs that France can rethink its Utopian version of citizenship in a way that is more appropriate to the pluralism of contemporary life.

Utopian citizenship Like the Enlightenment project in general, the modern concept of citizenship which took shape in France in the nineteenth century was a Utopian dream of the creation of the ideal being. Detached from parochial origins, belonging to no gender, race or nation, and guided by a blind faith in the connection between reason and civilization, the new 'Man' (the 'Superman') became the image of humanity itself. Let us consider some of the contradictions that were effaced in this project to convert dream into reality-and which today have unravelled so drama tically.

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A major feature of the construction of the abstract citizen was, as stated above, the separation of the universal from the particular, and the attempt to carve out a public space which would be governed by universalist principles. The subject was therefore divided into two figures: the citizen, who occupied the public or civic sphere, and the individual, who occupied the private and civilian sphere. The civic sphere refers to the subject who is part of a community of rights and is underscored by the principles of state intervention, egalitarianism and solidarity; the civilian sphere refers to the private subject and is underscored by the principles of liberalism, the market and inegalitarianism (Leca 1991 a:324-325). The policing of the frontier between the two spheres was achieved through a mixture of coercion and consent; laws enforced the divide (for example, the separation of Church and state in 1905) while the republican school became the primary locus for the inculcation of the hierarchy between the two spheres (an ideological training ground for the formation of future citizens; see, for example, Ozouf 1984). What was resolutely effaced in this human rights version of citizenship (based on the egalitarian nature of the public sphere) were the material inequalities arising from modern capitalism, which traversed public and private spheres. As Eric Hobsbawm (1986) has pointed out, labour movements demonstrated the limitations of a 'human rights' approach to citizenship. We have since learnt that there is a profound gap between formal and substantive rights, the latter often having to be fought for outside the political-legal framework (as a way eventually of redefining that framework). In classical Marxism, the 'neutrality' and 'universality' of the public spheremaintained through the apparatus of the state-merely masked the hegemony of bourgeois power and ideology. The dichotomies between civil society and the state, and (correspondingly) between private and public law (cf. Renaut 1993: 7-9), were therefore the result of an ideological 'trick' on the part of the dominant class to obscure social and economic inequality and relations of power. A more nuanced approach to the modern construction of citizenship is offered by the political scientist Jean Leca who suggests that this model not only benefited bourgeois individualism but also the solidarity of the welfare state: Citizenship is not only indispensable to bourgeois society to maintain the abstraction of an apparent universalism and to legitimize class domination under the guise of the State, as Marx maintained. Citizenship is even more indispensable to the welfare

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state to sustain civil society through increasing social rights of individuals and organizing these within a concept of the needs of the community. (Leca 1991 b:203) Whatever one's view is on this, it is clear that the classical Marxist critique of the liberal version of citizenship did little to problematize the universalist project itself. On the contrary, socialism was a counterculture which shared the modern conviction that science could explain the world ('For Marx, science ensured certainty', Edgar Morin in Morin and Nair 1997:11) and embraced unequivocally the proselytizing universalist aspirations of modernity; it simply posited a different view of the ineluctable onward march of history ('Marx believed in the profound rationality of History', Morin in Morin and Nair 1997:12). Though correct in unmasking the distinction between formal and substantive rights, the Marxist critique of liberalism believed that the solution to the problem necessarily lay in the provision of collective rights. The Left's response was therefore to exchange one universalism for another: that is, the abstract formal notion of rights in liberal-bourgeois culture for the collectivist notion of rights in socialist culture. This simply reinforced (rather than challenged) the binary opposition between the individual and the collectivity: an abstract individualism was opposed by an equally abstract version of ' the people'. Yet, as Stuart Hall and David Held point out (1989: 178179), it is not always the case that 'the people' are necessarily and automatically the means towards greater rights and an extension of citizenship: we have only to consider the ambiguous results of the welfare state, the numerous infringements by the state on individual freedoms, the fact that 'the people' cannot always be relied on to be just to minorities, and so on, to realize the validity of this critique. Both in Western democracies and under 'real existing socialism', modernity was characterized by the gap between the rhetoric of increased liberty and the entrapment of the individual within a labyrinthine bureaucratic and administrative apparatus. The point of convergence between two equally abstract concepts of citizenshipthe first reifying the individual, the second the collectivity in the form of the proletariat-was clearly the role of the state. In republican France it was the state-more properly, the national state-which regulated the separation of the private from the public individual, the civilian from the citizen. The mission of the republican state was to carve out the uniform space of citizenship from the diversity of individual cultural experience, and to create a homogeneous nation

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from a land of regions (Weber 1976). This political-legal space would embody the Enlightenment precepts of freedom, justice and equality. This was the sphere in which the civilized face of the human condition would be realized in all its splend our. However, the dream of a transcendent public sphere which allowed each individual to shed his or her private garb and become fully 'human' proved to be a false Utopia. Science, history and progress, on which the dream was founded, have turned out to be false Messiahs. The universality of 'Man' was little more than 'the brotherhood of men' (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993:28), 'not universal but male' (Gaspard 1997:165), humanity seen in terms of 'fraternity' (Ozouf 1989). According to Fran<.;:oise Gaspard, the men of the Enlightenment 'followed the Rousseau of Emile who separates the sexes and the spheres and assigns to women the transmission of customs and to men the creation of laws' (1997:161). Furthermore, the universality of 'Man' turned out to be the somewhat le ss-than -universa l brotherhood of French men: the abstract and disembodied citizen of the modern world was, in reality, the transformation of the French male body into the blueprint for humanity. Citizenship was required to disavow both its gender and its nation; the mission of the state was to elevate this particular form of sectionalism to the heights of universal truth and to conflate national and natural law. The more recent emergence of new cultural and ethnic identities have, in the words of Hall and Held (1989:187), presented 'new challenges to, and produce[d] new tensions within ... the "universalising" thrust in the idea of citizenship'. The conflation between national and natural law-France seen as the incarnation of humanity-was a fundamental feature of the revolutionary ethos. As Sieyes says in his famous 'Qu'est-ce que Ie tiers etat?' of 1789, 'The national will ... never needs anything but its own existence to be legal. It is the source of all legality' (cited in Todorov 1989: 255). This sentiment was echoed in Article 3 of the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, written in August 1789, which announced that 'the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation' (cited in Todorov 1989:255). Todorov (1989:254) suggests that Sieyes only distinguishes between national and natural law to link them 'in an apparently unproblematic relationship' . The same conflation between national and natural law, the nation and the universal, the citizen and 'Man' (d. "'Droi ts de l'h omme" et "droits du citoyen": la dialectique moderne de l'egalite et de la libert€:' in Balibar 1992:124-150) can also be seen in the thought of Rousseau

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and Michelet. For Michelet, France's laws were those of reason itself, for France was the home of universal thought. In the nineteenth century, citizenship and nationality became virtually indistinguishable, while both were conflated with universal human rights. As Rogers Brubaker (1992:43) points out, '[a]s a democratic revolution, the French Revolution institutionalized political rights as citizenship rights, transposing them from the plane of the city-state to that of the nation-state, and transforming them from a privilege to a general right'. Alain Touraine (1994:114) suggests that, over the last two centuries, it was the association between rights and national self-determination that created an unquestioned link between democratic and national aspirations. But, paradoxically, by making the nation (or rather the nation-state) the guarantor of the rights of 'the people', the Revolution created a unique machine for the suppression of a multitude of individual rights. The modern construction of citizenship was therefore constituted by a cluster of discourses frequently pulling in different directions, yet whose problematic nature was obscured within an apparent coherence of purpose and design. This 'coherence' was especially maintained by the idealized, state-driven narrative of the French nation and (as we have seen in relation to concepts of culture) the opposition between France and Germany: the French model was based on the jus soli, individual assimilation, and a political-legal concept of the nation, in contrast to the German model which was based on the jus sanguinis, a predetermined and organic concept of the community, and hence an ethnocultural concept of the nation (cf. Schnapper 1994). Not that this description is entirely inaccurate. It is simply that, like all binary oppositions, it tends to present each term as a unified and coherent entity, whereas the inevitable interpenetration (or, as we have said previously, 'contamination') of processes denies any such unity and coherence of individual terms or absolute antithesis between them. As Brubaker says (1992:2): 'To characterize French and German traditions of citizenship and nationhood in terms of such ready-made conceptual pairs as universalism and particularism, cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism, Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic irrationalism, is to pass from characterization to caricature.' This is why the ritualistic republican invocation of Renan's famous dictum that the nation is 'a daily plebiscite' is so misleading: Renan's discourse in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? is, as we have stated before, torn between 'Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic irrationalism', and between a 'political' and 'ethnocultural' perspective (Silverman 1992). Rather than being a political-legal concept of citizenship as opposed to an ethnocultural concept, the French model should more properly be seen as a disavowal of its own ethnocultural particularism by

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projecting it on to Germany. This orthodoxy was established at the end of the nineteenth century with the triumph of the republican consensus on the nature of the citizen and the nation. The Dreyfus affair sealed this triumph. Henceforth, blood and soil definitions of the nation of the type propounded by Drumont, Barres and Action Fran<;aise (rooting the citizen deterministically within a community, a place, a culture and a nation) could be convincingly opposed by the message of egalitarianism and universalism, so that they appeared to be polar opposites. By associating ethnocultural or more overtly racist theories with the German tradition, republicans could more easily claim the neutral, progressive, rational, race-free, universalist and egalitarian tradition for the French. The 'purity' of the French model of citizenship was therefore dependent on the assignment of positive and negative roles to France and Germany respectively. It was precisely this process of 'othering' -in which the subject's own difference is evacuated, disavowed and projected on to others-which underpinned the French Enlightenment project of which citizenship formed such a crucial part. As we have observed, the modern concepts of civilization and humanity only made sense in a system of classification which designated others as barbaric and sub-human who needed surveying, controlling, disciplining and assimilating. The purer the vision, the more the eye became attuned to all that did not conform, to all that was dirty, excessive and subversive, and which therefore had to be excised from view (or at least managed and tamed). In Chapter 2 we noted that herein lay the foundations for one of the major forms of modern racism. Other bodies were misshapen, ugly, exotic (perhaps) but definitely inferior measured against the abstract and strangely body-less citizen. They were termed ' subjects' instead of citizens (Balibar 1984), 'natives (indigenes)' instead of nationals, and were characterized by an excess of somatic traits. The dream of egalitarian citizenship was therefore also the nightmare of sub-human life; the latter was an inevitable by-product of the former. Like all repressed demons, it threatened, at every moment, to shatter the illusion on which the dream was built. Today those 'demons' have emerged from that murky world of the margins to which they were consigned, as of course they had to. Universalism has turned out to be an illusion obscuring just another particularism-yet one which mobilized all the resources of a growing industrial/institutional/ideological complex in the attempt to convert this illusion into reality. The universal citizen was, in fact, the abstract product of bourgeois individualism and Western patriarchy. The model was founded on state-regulated antitheses which were eventually 'found

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out' (with the demise of the national state): between the public and the private, the political-legal and the socio-economic, the secular and the religious, the modern and the pre-modern, science and belief, centre and periphery, civilization and barbarity. (It is no surprise, then, that the classic texts of cultural modernism were constructed around the highly ambivalent frontiers separating these ' spheres'.) The ' space' of citizenship so constructed-purified of all forms of social division, converted into a pure, abstract, free-floating and ahistorical domain, the ultimate goal of humankind, as Sami Nair says (1992) -is in the process of fragmenting. This is both a cause for celebration and a source of anxiety and danger.

The revenge of civil society Postmodernity means learning the foremost lesson of modernism that, in Yeats' famous line from 'The Second Coming', 'things fall apart; the centre cannot hold'. The assault on the centre has come from numerous sources: the challenge to objectivity and truth has converted scientific and rational debate from grand narratives into local and situated discourses; l feminism has exposed the patriarchal assumptions of the modern order and shattered the division between the private and public spheres, between the personal and the political; anti-colonial and postcolonial struggles and consciousness have exposed the ethnocentric (and frequently racist) assumptions of assimilation; the advent of mass culture has exposed the class connotations of classical culture; globalization and advances in electronic communications have rendered problematic the links between state, nation and culture. The whole edifice on which modernity was built and which held in place that confident centre is today in the process of disintegration. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this shaking of the 'centre' is the demise of the nation-state as the major context for the regulation of social, economic and political life and as the prime locus of imaginary identifications. As Fran<;ois Dubet and Michel Wieviorka observe in their introduction to a collection in honour of Alain Touraine: the era in which the nation constituted the imaginary and symbolic framework and within which economic modernization, cultural unification and the political treatment of social demands were organized seems to be fading, at least in many Western countries. The increasing difficulties that these countries face in integrating

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these three registers-socio-economic, political and cultural-are evidence of a decline or crisis of modernity. (Dubet and Wieviorka, eds, 1995:13-14) These developments have been felt across the developed world. Yet in France the crisis appears to be more acute than elsewhere. This is possibly due to the fact that the universalist and centralizing aspirations of the state and the consequent reification of the public sphere of citizenship were pursued with more zeal in France than other modern nation-states. The demise of the homogenizing nation-state has therefore unleashed pent-up forces which, formerly, had few outlets for self-expression. According to Sami Nair (1992:19), the crisis in France is perceived to be less the result of global processes than 'the revenge of civil society on a state which has always oppressed it'. The effect, according to Castoriadis (1996:92), is that 'nobody knows today what it means to be a citizen'. What form has this 'revenge of civil society' taken in recent years and how has it affected questions of citizenship? The clearest result of the developments of recent decades is the transformation of the citizen from abstract figure embodying humanity to everyday individual with warts and all. The revenge of civil society, in this sense, means the proud announcement of all those individual attributes, beliefs and passions which the modern mind considered ignoble and parochial, and which needed to be transcended -ethnic and religious affiliation, cultural identity, popular cultural forms, and so on. In other words, the particular has gained the upper hand over the universal. Nair describes this development as a reversal of the hierarchy of the modern era: Now citizenship is driven by the predominance of the particular over the universal, the concrete over the abstract, the individual over the collective, the ethical over the ideological. While the major preoccupation of the republican concept was universality, the design of an abstract Utopia as the goal of every ordinary citizen, equality as the sine qua non of communal life, and the construction of a neutral public space, the new concept, more democratic, is centred on the individual subject, rejects the abstract project, prioritizes freedom over equality and opens up the public space to the clash of cultural particularisms. (Nair 1992:44-45? Nair's analysis reveals, once again, how the decline of the modern concept of the citizen is seen in terms of the movement from a

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republican to a democratic model, and from a concern with equality to that of freedom. 3 Rights and duties are no longer enshrined in tablets of stone; they are what we make of them. We have rejected the formal, austere and uplifting ethos of modern humanist aspirations, guided by a profound belief in progress and the creation of a Utopian future. Today we are pleasure-seekers, content to pursue our desires in the present, following the rules of freedom, self-expression and selfgratification rather than the authoritarian moral codes proclaimed confidently by the republican fathers (Lipovetsky 1992). In other words, this is the age of a new form of individualism and liberalism. No longer is the life project of the individual bound up with membership of (and sacrifice to) a particular class or nation; no longer does the state have the capacity (or even the desire) to mould individuals into citizens. In the republican model, the individual was simply part of the whole and therefore inevitably regulated by the rules which applied to the collectivity. As Alain Ehrenberg (1991: 283) says, this model was founded on 'the public effacement of the individual in the name of the collective with which he or she identified and which transcended him or her'. Today, on the other hand, the withering of the state and the celebration of the particular have led to 'the predominance of individual rights over collective obligations' (Lipovetsky 1992:208). As we noted in Chapter 2, the individual is expected (or rather, required) to construct his/her own existence in a world bereft of institutional straitjackets and safety nets. The individual has been de-institutionalized and privatized, sold off like the rest of the family silver and left to fend for him/herself. We are all characters in search of an author; we have all been forced to learn the Sartreian lesson that existence precedes essence. The life project today is one of self-improvement and self-constitution. The impetus must come from within rather than be imposed from outside. This is the sign of contemporary democracies. As Debray says of the body today, 'the body as depicted in television advertising is no longer the disciplined body promoted by pre-war cinema; it is "in form", not in uniform' (Debray 1993:40). Little wonder, as Ehrenberg (1991) has pointed out, that today's major role models come from the realms of business and sport, with their underlying principles of competition, ambition and personal performance as the general marks of success. But little wonder, too, that the self-reliance required today, in a world in which the individual has been privatized, runs in tandem with the general feelings of uncertainty and fear that deregulation has engendered (d. Ehrenberg 1995, Mongin 1991) and the divorce between those who can swim with the new tide and those who cannot.

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This is a new individualism which took off especially at the time of the modernization of France in the 1950s and 1960s and has since progressed along with the relentless commodification of the social sphere. Kristin Ross (1995:11, 106) recalls that Cornelius Castoriadis, Henri Lefebvre and Edgar Morin all theorized the retreat in the 1960s from the social into an idealized version of the household and everyday life as a form of 'privatization' of the individual around consumption: With the decline or decomposition of identities based on work or social collectivities, what remains? For Lefebvre the answer lies in the qualitatively new way that everyday life, private or 'reprivatized' life, and family life ... are intimately linked in this period around the identity of the home dweller, the inhabitant, and the practices associated with the sole remaining value, the private value par excellence, that of consumption. (Ross 1995:107) However, the new individualism is not the only outcome of the breakdown of the republic of citizens. As we saw in Chapter 2, new tribes grouping around new forms of communitarianism are the flipside to the new individualism. As Sami N air says, 'the more pronounced individualism and communitarianism as a prop lead ultimately to the same result, which is the departure from the sphere of citizenship and exile from the collectivity' (1992:214). The crisis of republican institutions and ideology has left a 'space' for the creation of new forms of collectivity (Wieviorka 1991), mobilizing not around the former codes of republican civic solidarity but around ethnic, religious and other cultural labels, used primarily as a sign of individual identity in a world which requires (ever more insistently) forms of identification. This new tribalism is every bit as 'postmodern' as the new individualism; neither should be confused with their counterparts of the modern era (Lipovetsky 1992:158-159). The existence today of a new communitarianism (neo-communautarisme) alongside a new individualism (neo-individualisme) should therefore not be seen as a contradiction, since both are products of the fragmented political and social landscape of the contemporary era. As Ehrenberg (1991: 15) points out, 'they are the two faces of French society today .. . . Both are the result of the consensual nature of our society and of the crisis of the republican model of social integration through citizenship'. The revenge of civil society' means a redefinition of the political and social spheres along these two broad lines, and the emergence of new players in the game. The decline of the centralizing state, with its

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crusading mission to nationalize society, has therefore meant the disintegration of a whole politics constructed in direct proportion to the strength of the state and the homogeneity of the nation. As Laurent Cohen-Tanugi (1993:96) has pointed out in relation to politics in the modern era, 'given that the nation was single and indivisible and the State was its incarnation, the aim of all political combat was the conquest of the State, which was the sole legitimate instrument capable of transforming society'. Today, however, 'it is no longer a question of transforming society, which was the aim of revolutionary politics, but of debating its concrete modes of organization within the framework of the principles of liberal democracy' (Cohen-Tanugi 1993: 25). Lyotard defines the same evolution, from an oppositional politics founded on the clash of grand ideological principles to a democracy of local skirmishes: The political warfare of the modern era was characterized by the clash of two legitimizing principles: God against the Republic, Race against universal Man, the Proletarian against the Citizen. Whether national or international, the conflict for legitimacy always took the form of a total civil war. Postmodern politics, on the other hand, is a question of strategic management, and the wars are simply police operations. These operations no longer set out to delegitimize the adversary but to oblige him to negotiate his integration into the system according to the rules. (Lyotard 1993:172) Marcel Gauchet (1990:96) talks of the pluralist politics of postmodernity in terms of a 'negotiated juxtaposition'. It is therefore no longer a question of transforming society through a capture of the state apparatus, using the revolutionary rhetoric of old (Alain Touraine in Thibaud and Touraine 1993); all talk today is of managing change (Cohen-Tanugi 1993:25) which, for a large part, emanates from sources other than the institutions of the state. The 'emancipatory' and centralized politics of old have given way to what Touraine defined in the 1970s as new social movements and what Anthony Giddens (1991: 209-232) has termed 'life-politics' or 'sub-politics', that is, the politicization since the 1960s of single issues such as questions of gender, sexuality, the regions, the environment, bio-technology, and so on. These issues are as much related to local and global factors as to specifically national state institutions. Social relations, as Scott Lash points out, 'are increasingly extra-institutional' (Beck et al. 1994:214). This decentred politics and release of civil society from its tutelage under an overbearing and unitary state has mixed consequences. Some

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argue that the new liberalism is the path towards a truly democratic and pluralist society. For example, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi (1993:63) suggests that 'liberal democracy signifies in France today, more than ever before,p/ura/ist democracy'. He argues that, unlike in other countries where a culture of liberalism and democracy went hand in hand, the construction in France of a uniform national culture established by means of a strongly interventionist state prevented this partnership and led to a weakening of civil society: The profound inability of French political culture, especially on the Left, to dissociate every public utility, every social form and every sense of virtue from the institutions of the state, and its inability to find a compromise between the law and the market, and between ethics and society, have put a block on thinking 'the political' in any other way than in relation to the State, to the consequent detriment of civil society and, in the final analysis, to democracy. (Cohen-Tanugi 1993:99; see also Lipovetsky 1983) 4 This form of neo-liberalism has a naive (or perhaps cynical) faith in the ability of the market to bring democracy. It ignores the fact that the rise of a liberalized civil society and the decline of the state simply create new forms of power relations and inequalities, rather than removing them altogether. Yet even if one rejects Cohen-Tanugi's liberal thesis, it is difficult not to agree with his view that 'the revenge of civil society' is more dramatic in France than in other Western democracies. The national state apparatus of the Republic and its ideology (characterized by what Cohen-Tanugi calls 'grandpa's Republic, the authoritarianism of the nation-state and the protected economy', 1993:22) were certainly more entrenched than in Britain and therefore have further to fall. The new liberalism-just as the new nationalism (or national populism) -seems much more brash, perhaps because there is a greater vacuum to fill. As in the former communist states, the strength of the backlash is perhaps in direct proportion to the power wielded by the state beforehand. 5 However, the emergence of civil society into the political sphere is certainly not only welcomed by neo-liberals. The breakdown of the division between the private and the public and the personal and the political has led to the politicization of a whole range of issues which were formerly consigned to the private sphere, and hence a broadening of the concept of citizenship beyond its state-based definition and its historical link with the nation. Citizenship today is about recycling

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everyday household waste as well as codes of behaviour in the public sphere, domestic violence as well as public probity. The extension of politics to include any and every aspect of everyday life has democratized the political in the same way that culture has been forced out of its ivory tower. The concern today about issues which were simply never on the political agenda in the past shows that the fragmentation of the republic of citizens into new individualisms and new tribalisms does not necessarily signify a decline of the political or the rise of a new amoralism. On the contrary, our obsession today with everything that touches on life and death (diet, cancer, abortion, Aids, euthanasia, and so on), and our awareness that our lives are inextricably bound up within a network of interlocking processes (local and global) are indications of the fact that today politics is everywhere. As Edgar Morin points out (Morin and Nair 1997:21), 'there has been a politicization of what is infra, extra and supra political'. As regards morality, never before have so many issues been considered from an ethical point of view. The decline of state-controlled and prescriptive formulae as the solution to ethical problems means that everything is 'up for grabs' (although the problem is, of course, that left to our own devices we must make it up as we go along). Gilles Lipovetsky (1992:15) maintains that ' the twilight era of duty' that we are living through today simply means that we are no longer willing to accept the sacrifices which accompanied ' the rhetoric of austere, allembracing and manichean duty' of modernity. He detects two antagonistic logics underpinning new ethical concerns today: the first rejects the search for ultimate solutions, is aware of the complexity of social and individual situations, and adopts a pluralist, experimental and personalized approach; the second turns its back on social and individual realities in the name of a new ethical and juridical dogmatism. (Lipovetsky 1992: 16) So if, as Lipovetsky suggests, we have rejected the duties that accompanied the disciplinary society of 'the age of morality' and have entered what he terms 'the postmoralist age of the new democracies', this in no way implies an end to morality as such, but simply an end to 'the ideology of disciplinary duty taken to the extreme, or in other words, the value of supreme self-sacrifice on the altar of the Family, History, the Party, the Fatherland, and Humanity' (Lipovetsky 1996: 28). According to Mongin (1996b:61), it is precisely the abandonment

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of the moral framework (and certainties) of modernity that has led to a remoralization of diverse issues today: 'We have never spoken so much about ethics because we are worried about our responsibilities and about how we should put them into practice.' Lipovetsky's vision of contemporary society is of the co-existence of 'an irresponsible, I'm-alright-Jack individualism' alongside 'a responsible individualism linked to a certain number of ethical values' (1996:26). More generally, we have also seen how living in the wake of modernity (and especially 'after Auschwitz') means the search for a new ethics vis-a-vis 'the other' which aims neither to assimilate 'the other' to the same or expel 'the other' from the promised land (which are really two sides of the same coin). In this sense, postmodernity signals a rebirth in ethics starting from a position of tabula rasa (or at least with the benefit of hindsight), and the consequent construction of a new ethical (and practical rather than abstract) concept of citizenship. However, we know too that the 'revenge of civil society' is accompanied by new dangers which the republic of citizens, for all its faults, held firmly in check. For example, the diversification and democratization of the political could be seen to herald the depoliticization of the social sphere, in the same way that, for some, the conflation of the cultural with everyday life means the end of culture. If politics can include anything and everything that affects our lives (from the local to the global), then the political is fragmented into a myriad pieces whose connections and totality we feel incapable of grasping and whose direction we feel powerless to alter. As Steven Connor points out: this expansion and decentring of politics ... brings with it the possibility of a disastrous decompression of politics; if everything can be said to be political, then, for a politics of opposition, this can often be equivalent to saying that nothing is really or effectively political any more. (Connor 1989:226) This extension and diversification of the political could then be said to disempower individuals who, in the face of such a bewildering labyrinth of technical questions, are increasingly seeking refuge in narrow individualism or mythologized communitarianism. Furthermore, if everything is political then life- style and cultural identity are as much a political statement as opposition to racist violence. Here we are back with Alain Finkielkraut's 'a pair of boots

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has the same value as Shakespeare' -the nightmare vision of a world in which all hierarchies have been flattened. From this perspective, any moral position is simply a non-starter, since ethics demands a code of conduct and a sense of values which pure relativism would deny. In Chapters 3 and 4 we discussed h ow this 'democratization' of culture has led to an expansion of the cultural or aesthetic realm across what was formerly designated as the social and political spheres. We also discussed the problematic link between this cultural turn and the production and consumption h abits of late capitalism. More over, the flattening of time, achieved especially through advanced communications and information systems, has undermined former networks of solidarity for, as Jean Chesneaux (1996:111 ) points out, 'it is precisely the sphere of citizenship-that is, the capacity to "think" the social collectively and actively-that is threatened by a time which is contracted into the immediate and the sho rt term'. 6 In other words, the shifting configurations of space/ time, the victory of the particular over the universal, the demise of the transcendent realm of modern citizenship, the new celebration of the individual or 'new tribe' over the citizen, and the disappearance of the citizen behind the consumer, all are p ossible signs of the end of the social as a distinct space of meeting and solidarity beyond differences. These questions are at the heart of the current crisis of citizenship in France.

The end of the social? At the time of the bicentenary celebration of the French Revolution, a drinks mat in Paris read: '1789: the subject becomes citizen. 1989: the consumer becomes citizen.' This raises, in succinct form, perhaps the most pressing question of all as to the state of citizenship today: is the 'revenge of civil society' simply the triumph of the market? Has the citizen (that social and public being) given way to the consumer (that individualistic and asocial being)? The fear of many commentators is that the loss of the power of the state to uphold the civic question and the principles of equality and solidarity, and to act as a check on the inequalities of the market-place, has left the path open to an aggressive neo-liberalism and a self-centred individualism. In other words-and to adopt the formula much u sed by French commentators -it is a question of 'the "disappearance" of the subject as citizen, along with the republican model on which the citizen was founded' in favour of 'the Americanization of the mode of social production' (Nair in Morin and Nair 199 7:21 1).

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According to this scenario, the 'revenge of civil society' is, in reality, none other than the revenge of the Americanized liberal free market against the state, armed with the new ideological construction of freedom in the form of buying power. ? Here the civic is either dropped completely (as in Margaret Thatcher's statement that there is no such thing as society, only individuals), or transformed from a space regulated by the natural entitlement to rights to one that is regulated simply by a variety of contractual arrangements and bargaining power. The social disintegrates into an unrestrained space of competition between individuals (d. Ehrenberg 1991). As Chantal Mouffe (1993: 80) has pointed out, in the liberal conception 'it is the citizen which is sacrificed to the individual'. Jean Leca (1991 b:209) sees this state of affairs as marking the death-knoll for citizenship for 'without some sort of sense of community there is no citizenship, for a "political community" is not simply a collection of individuals'. Joel Roman also argues for a community of interest beyond the supposed autonomy of the individual: Citizenship can no longer be considered simply in terms of the autonomous citizen whose sovereign power consists in casting a vote at election time. Citizenship is rather more akin to a capacity for participation in social exchange, which is constitutive of both the stability of identity and of individual freedom. (Roman 1996:40) Cornelius Castoriadis, echoing the famous formula of Ernest Renan on the nation, expresses the same sentiment: Society is never simply a collection of individuals who come and go and are ultimately replaceable, living in a particular territory, speaking a certain language and practising 'externally' certain customs. On the contrary, these individuals 'belong' to this society because they participate in its social and imaginary meanings, its 'norms', 'values', 'myths', 'representations', 'projects', 'traditions', etc., and because they share (whether they know it or not) the will to be a part of this society and to perpetuate its existence. (Castoriadis 1996:20) (see also p. 222) The new forms of inequality which have arisen from the demise of the old social contract (cf. Fitoussi and Rosanvallon 1996) are not necessarily those of class exploitation but of social and economic exclusion on a number of different levels. This has led to what Alain Touraine and his colleagues at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences

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Sociales in Paris have termed the 'dualization' of society: that is, a division of society into those who can and those who cannot compete in the market. Touraine has suggested that the 'society of exclusion' corresponds to a post-industrial society in the way that exploitation and social conflict were the major features of industrial society: We have left a society of production and social conflicts and entered a society of consumption and communication. Consequently, our society is no longer one of conflicts but one of exclusion. Industrial society functioned on a 'high-low' axis; the society of communication functions on an 'inside-outside' aXIS.

(quoted in Mongin 1992:5-6) Touraine describes this process in terms of a shift from a vertical to a horizontal paradigm, from a profoundly hierarchical structure to the so-called openness of our liberal democratic societies today. The oppositional nature of industrial society (capitalism/ socialism) has given way to the simple 'in or out' formula of post-industrial society (given that there are no longer any alternatives on offer): 'it is no longer a question of up or down but in or out: those who are not in want desperately to be so, otherwise they find themselves in a social emptiness' (Touraine 1991:166). This is bleak indeed for the modern concept of the social which (in principle, it should be said) ironed out differences by bringing people together around the common project of equality and solidarity in the public sphere, or at least held out the possibility of improvement through the realization of an alternative political programme (socialism/ communism). What we are witnessing today is the reduction of the social and the public sphere to the uniform rule of the market, and the decline of the ethical code of citizenship in favour of self-gratification and a carefree hedonism. We have noted how the state and the media have given up on the modern project of moulding individuals into citizens according to the criteria of national homogeneity and uplifting ideals of culture and morality; today it is simply a question of consumer demand and customer satisfaction. The horse is now following the cart, yet both are propelled by a media and advertising blitz on our senses. The private and the public have fused around the common denominators of sensation, spectacle, effusion and consumption. As Regis Debray says (1993:60), 'the "in" State ... has thrown in its lot with the cult of "civil society'''. And, in the process, the notion of social reality has receded as the real and the imaginary have merged through

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the ubiquitous presence of the image. Jean Baudrillard has noted how the proliferation of information through electronic circuits destroys genuine sociality and creates instead a 'simulated social' (Kellner 1989:87) in which social interaction is transformed into the apathy and sluggis hne ss of the masses (Baudrillard 1981). Georges Balandier (1992: 120) also believes that the corollary of the development of 'electronic societies' is the reduction of the political sphere to the demands of crude sensationalism. He suggests that this 'culture of the look and the spectacle' therefore constitutes 'a major perversion of the democratic process' (1994:204). Given the changes that have taken place in recent years (many of which have already been discussed in previous chapters), the whole structure on which the republican concept of citizenship was based has simply disappeared-or at le ast been transformed. Yet we have also seen the fierce rearguard action against these changes being fought in France- not only by cultural reactionaries and political extremists but by a whole range of commentators and activists who are fearful of the consequences of the demise of the republic of citizens, the end of the social and the triumph of the image over the word. Globalization (especially Americanization) and multiculturalism have been demonized as the culprits, allowing die-hard republicans to cling on to an idealized belief in the nation as the only hope of salvation (see Chapter 2). Diversification, difference and pluralism are commonly seen as h arbingers of the fragmentation of the Republic and the breakdown of social cohesion, in that they promote individual liber ty and cultural identity over and above the cause of social solidarity (and are anyway profoundly imbued with the ethos of liberal individualism and consumption). According to this vision, as we have already seen, the 'crisis' is interpreted as an invasion of the cultural into the political sphere, the particularist into the universal sphere, the differentialist into the assimilationist sphere (as if cultural particularism had been absent before), leading to a nightmare scenario of the Americanization of France (multiculturalism, the splintering of society into a juxtaposition of communities, affirmative action programmes for the advancement of minorities, and so on). A deeper fear, habitually underplayed or simply not recognized, is the feminization of the 'masculine' public sphere of citizenship. The universalist tradition of the equality of citizens has been profoundly gendered according to the hierarchical organization of a masculine public sphere and feminine private sphere (Schnapper 1998:459-466). Any challenge to the transcendent status of the public sphere (the sphere of republican citizenship) therefore carries with it a threat to masculine

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power. Given the profoundly entrenched nature of the republican concept of nation, citizenship and rights in France-which is accepted widely and often uncritically by commentators of both sexes and of all political persuasions (see, for example, Kristeva 1990) -it is no surprise that gender studies and women's studies, like ethnic studies, are virtually non-existent in the French academy, although (as we noted in the previous chapter) a particular strand of French feminism has had a profound effect on the academies in Britain and America. (For good overviews of feminism and the women's movement in France, see Duchen 1986 and 1987. See also the stimulating analyses of Colette Guillaumin in Guillaumin 1995.) As Fran<.;:oise Gaspard (1997) has observed, the introduction of a gendered (and therefore differentialist) perspective into the 'non-partisan' (egalitarian) sphere constitutes a threat to the 'scientific' (and implicitly patriarchal) legitimacy of the republican universalist tradition. A more general perception of the (Americanized) process of democratization and its threat to French republicanism is that it functions as a global anaesthetic which effaces the jagged edges of the world. By inducing the same reflex reactions to the imaginary as to the real, it undermines our ability to distinguish between the two (for what meaning is there beyond the phenomenal forms themselves?). We have consequently been converted from rational beings into zombies, at the mercy of fleeting images, sensations and experiences which we have become incapable of understanding or interpreting-or, more accurately, simply have no desire to understand, for 'understanding' has become secondary to ' feeling'. The fears expressed above are part of a nightmare scenario in which the republic of citizens has given way, with catastrophic consequences, to a democracy of individuals, each one of whom is trapped within an impoverishing concept of cultural identity. Sunil Khilnani, writing in Le Dibat (1990:181-182), captures this pessimism when (as an outsider looking in) he finds no signs of a renewal of a ' citizenship of participation' in France but simply the dissolution of the values of citizenship into ' a narcissistic individualism'. It is precisely this fear of particularism and atomization which leads many to cling on desperately to a nostalgic belief in the universalism of old as the only cure for what is seen as the decline of civilization. However, although the decline of the state and the 'revenge of civil society' might favour the forces of individualism within a liberal philosophy of the free market, this does not mean that there is not also another side to this debate. The problem of how to discuss questions of equality, citizenship and solidarity without recourse to the worn

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republican (and ethnocentric) rhetoric of national homogeneity, or the socialist rhetoric of the radical transformation of society through the appropriation of the state, or, on the other hand, the neo-liberal conflation of citizen and consumer, is being vigorously debated in France. The apocalyptic vision of many might simply be the inability to see beyond the classic dichotomies of modern sociological thought between universalism and particularism, the individual and society, and, in Louis Dumont's terms (1983), between 'holism' and 'individualism'. Contrary to Khilnani's bleak prognostications, there are numerous signs of a renewal of the concept of citizenship, not through a nostalgic recreation of the lost golden age of the Enlightenment but through a willingness to rethink the binary oppositions underpinning the construction of the abstract citizen of the modern era and confront the complex, plural and frequently ambiguous relationship between the individual and the world. 8 For example, Alain Touraine (1992:410-411 ) dismisses the sort of nostalgia expressed above as inappropriate in today's world, for 'modern men and women are no more citizens of the Enlightenment than they are God's creatures; they are responsible for themselves'. Touraine warns of the consequences of not heeding this warning: Do not let us give in to the temptation, born in the eighteenth century, of conflating 'Man' and the citizen. This was a grandiose project which produced the greatest catastrophes since it led to the destruction of all the barriers which could limit absolute power. Instead of confusing 'Man' and the citizen, democracy should explicitly recognize (in the same way as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen) that popular sovereignty must respect natural rights, and even be founded on them .... The most advanced society is that which recognizes most explicitly the equal rights of rationalization and those of the subject, and understands the necessity to combine them. (1992:401) Touraine's redefinition of the nature of citizenship today (see Touraine 1992 and 1994) can be seen here as an attempt to forge a new relationship between what he terms 'rationalization (Ia rationalisation)' and the rights of the subject (Ia subjectivation): in other words, between the universal and the particular, between rational law and individual expression, and between social integration and individual freedom. Equal rights can no longer be considered in the abstract way in which they were conceived in the modern era, since this version of equality

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refused to recognize cultural difference and the multidimensional rights of the subject. On the other hand, cultural identity cannot be the sole base for the rule of law, as this would provide no common criteria for the establishment of social cohesion. Touraine also warns against the danger of subjects becoming mere consumers of policies and material goods at the mercy of 'public opinion'. 9 Touraine's recent work has been in the spirit of 'rethinking the subject', that is, viewing the subject between the poles of abstract law and individual needs and desires (see Dubet and Wieviorka, eds, 1995), in order to fashion a democracy appropriate to today's complex society. Michel Wieviorka (1993c) pursues a similar course and also argues for an articulation between common rules and individual freedom which avoids the jungle mentality of the market-place. Chantal Mouffe has described the problem of harmonizing the general and the particular in the following way: How to conceptualise our identities as individuals and as citizens in a way that does not sacrifice one to the other? The question at stake is how to make our belonging to different communities of values, language and culture compatible with our common belonging to a political community whose rules we have to accept. As against conceptions that stress commonality at the expense of plurality and respect for difference, or that deny any form of commonality in the name of plurality and difference, what we need is to envisage a form of commonality that respects diversity and makes room for different forms of individuality. (Mouffe 1993:80-81) 10 Edgar Morin insists that the relationship between the general and the particular must be seen in the context of the local/global nexus. It has been the inability of the French political classes to think beyond the limited horizons of 'the compartmentalized thought of bureaucratic techno-science', on the one hand, and 'the more and more particularized thought founded on ethnicity or the nation', on the other hand, that has constrained all attempts to envisage the true complexity and ambiguity of today's problems (Morin and Nair 1997: 24).11 Furthermore, these problems must take into account the multidimensional needs of human beings rather than separating the rational from the emotional, for 'human needs are not only economic and technical but also affective and mythological' (Morin and Nair 1997:25). Only in this way can we hope to learn from the mistakes of the Enlightenment:

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We must try to re-establish, in all its complexity, a being who cannot simply be reduced to relations of production or to economic relations, but who is, at one and the same time, biological, social, economic and mythological. We must not consider this being principally in terms of his/her prosaic activities-the technical, work, the search for material comfortsbut also in terms of his/her poetic activities-festival and celebration (fete), play, dance, gaiety, love, ecstasy. (Morin and Nair 1997:26; cf. Morin 1996 and Touraine 1992:348) Morin therefore adopts a modernist perspective on the interconnections between the technical world and the world of the psyche as a necessity for any understanding of the complexities of postmodern life (see also Morin and Nair 1997:140-143). As Kenneth Thompson points out in a discussion of what he terms 'constructive postmodernism', such attempts to reconsider what was discarded by rational and scientific thought of the modern era are not necessarily signs of a romantic or cultural conservatism as a reaction to postmodern developments: They are efforts to articulate new identities, communltles, and even Utopias, in the face of increasing ephemerality and social life that lacks foundation-a society of spectacles and fashions, fragmentation of work and class identities, destruction of local communities and natural resources. (Thompson 1992:249) As Joel Roman observes (1996:40), a new concept of citizenship in France depends on the capacity to break with the narrow legalistic and state-based version of rights and duties of the modern era (which was more tightly linked to the state than in other countries), and to construct a more 'lateral' version of citizenship which could incorporate the complex and multidimensional networks within which individuals find themselves today. Etienne Balibar has consistently called for a new concept of citizenship (Ia nouvelle citoyenneti) which would be founded, first and foremost, on the dissociation of the link between 'the Rights of Man' and 'the Rights of the Citizen' established at the time of the Revolution, and a re-thinking of rights in a 'post-national' era (see, especially, the collected essays in Balibar 1992 and 1998). Balibar's starting-point is, invariably, contemporary forms of exclusion-the Front National's 'national preference (Ia priference nationale)', the state's repressive measures

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towards illegal immigrants (Ies clandestins), the EU's creation of a citizenship of Europeans (citoyennete des Europeens) rather than a European citizenship (citoyennete europeenne or citoyennete en Europe) (Balibar 1998:69) -with a view to an imaginative reinvention of a democracy of inclusion. Balibar's unique contribution to this pressing task is to challenge the historical institutionalization of forms of exclusion (whether they are imposed through the state, the nation or the new global economy) as a prerequisite for rethinking democracy from the margins. The social movements for a new citizenship which grew out of the anti-racist struggles of the 1980s are a good example of this more open, inclusive and pluralistic approach to rights and social participation. They have exposed the outdated, exclusive and frequently ethnocentric nature of the republican concept of citizenship (Silverman 1992: Chapters 4 and 5). Democracy can no longer be conceived in terms which bind citizenship rigidly to nationality (cf. Tassin 1994). As Dominique Schnapper points out (1998:455), ' the link between nation and citizenship is not logical but historical'. The current conjuncture (post-colonial and arguably postnational) requires a reformulation of this link. Neither can democracy be conceived in terms which attempt to rationalize away pluralism, complexity and ambiguity. On the contrary, these are crucial to the very existence of democracy today. Abstract and rational blueprints for citizenship must now give way to a more pragmatic concern for the complex and ambiguous nature of rights. As Jean Chesneaux has remarked in relation to a democratic notion of time, ' contrary to all these preprogrammed and pre-conceived notions of time, democratic time is rich with diverse potential but also with ambiguities and possibly even dangers' (Chesneaux 1996: 115). However, despite the expressed desire (by numerous commentators and activists) to rethink citizenship in more pluralistic fashion, it should be reiterated that the moves for a redefinition of citizenship in France have emerged principally from debates around immigration, nationality and rights, and have by and large ignored what Nira Yuval-Davis has termed the 'gendered reading of citizenship' (Yuval-Davis 1997:4; cf. Walby 1994). Nevertheless, all those concerned with the reinvention of citizenship today share the general belief that individual subjectivity and social forms of collectivity need to be rearticulated in today's radically transformed landscape. The complexity, multidimensionality and ambiguity of identities and social life are at the core of this rethinking. Here we are once again confronted with the burning question of communication across differences. It is one thing to

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recognize the diversification of the world today; it is another to reinvent social life in the light of this knowledge. Jurgen Habermas believes that the tragic failure of the objectifying and instrumentalist rationality of modernity should not lead us to abandon rationality and modernity altogether (Habermas 1996), for it is the only means we have of preventing descent into total moral relativism, and our only chance of creating solid arities in the face of the destructive functionalism of capitalism (cf. Rose 1993). Habermas proposes a 'communicative rationality' as the counter-balance to 'instrumentali st rationality', for it alone can provide the necessary space for consensus beyond differences. It is also essential for the renewal of any leftwing project aimed at challenging the rule of the market. Habermas's resistance to postmodern differentialism and relativism is championed in France by those who also believe that we abandon the Enlightenment project at our peril. The debate between Habermas and Lyotard during the 1980s polarized the rationalist and antirationalist positions. According to Lyotard's critique of Habermas's 'communicative rationality' (see, for example, Lyotard 1979 and 1988a), its endorsement of and faith in the le gitimizing status of a transcendent reason (over and above 'local' language games) flies in the face of the postmodern reality of the end of meta-narratives. Habermas's v ie w that truth and va lue can emerge from the communicative interaction between social actors is, in Lyotard's eyes, simply a restatement of Enlightenment emancipatory discourse, and consequently ignores the irrevocable heterogeneity and contingency of different discursive fields. Habermas seems to place his faith in a rational public space which, as we have seen, might well have disappeared in recent years. What form of communication could there possibly be that was not already caught up in the complex network of 'situated' knowledges and mediatized representations, and was somehow beyond the social and economic determinations of contemporary democracy? Although he bemoans the demise of a transcendent rationality, Regis Debray at least recognizes that that pure space of reason is now a myth (if it ever existed at all), for what distinction can be made today between 'processes of communication' ('democratic discussion and argument') and 'technical processes' ('instrumentali st rationality')? Debray criticizes attempts to maintain the distinction between these two realms in the following way: It is as if public discussion of ends was not already subject to a whole array of technically determined means .. . . As if the exercise

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of citizenship was not already conditioned by the nature of our 'networks of thought'. As if twentieth-century publicity had not alre ady turned the eighteenth-century version on its he ad. Ahistorical and 'atechnical' (the two being mutually determining), the model of 'public space' now seems like a theoretical impasse that it would perhaps be better to abandon than attempt to renew. (Debray 1993:68) 12 Lyotard's 'incredulity towards meta-narratives' and openness to Ie differend-which marks 'the inc ommensurability of all regimes of phrases, all genres of linking' (Readings 1991: 118) -might be a more appropriate response to the realities of p ostmodern life than Habermas's 'communicative rationality'. At the same time, Lyotard's position might not be as hopelessly nihilist and relativist as some critics have asserted (see, for example, Dews 1986 and Norris 1993). Refusing the 'closure' implied in totalizing discourses and rejecting the notion (inherited from modernity) of a pure public space of 'communicative rationality' does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of any sense of values or dialogue across differences; it simply rec ognizes the fact that values are always contingent rather than absolute, and that dialogue must be ongoing and open-ended if differences are to be respected. As we noted in relation to Maspero's journey through the suburbs of Paris (Chapter 3), encounters today cannot escape this reality. Dialogue across difference is tentative, relationships have to be negotiated, and the social must be sensitive to the ambivalence of 'the other'. The contingency of value s and the ephemeral nature of solidarities signify a new way of understanding social life today: no longer driven by the Utopian ideologies of modernity but dependent on forms of collective and associative action whose aims are more modest and le ss abstract. Lipovetsky (1987:333) defines this mode of participation as 'in keeping with the basic desire for individual autonomy'. In this sense, collective action has not simply given way to egotistical individualism: it has accommodated itself to the demands for individual expression and freedom. Despite the dangers that emerge from the decline of the republican concept of citizenship, there are also positive signs that a new sense of citizenship can be forged. New ideas share some of the premises outlined above: the need to go beyond the hackneyed oppositions of modernity and the cliche-ridden language (langue de bois) of the political class; the belief in the multidimensional nature of the relationship between the individual and society, and the interconnections between the different levels; the myopia of viewing the nation-state as the primary

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context for consideration of these questions (for individuals are members of a variety of 'communities') and the need to recontextualize them within the local/global network; and finally, the importance of reconstituting a concept of the social as a radical alternative to contemporary neo-liberalism which would reduce us all to atomized individuals. The 'end of the social' is not at all a f ait accompli in France. It is true that, like the demise of the classical concept of culture, the idea of the social which accompanied the modern separation of the public and private spheres has today disappeared. Furthermore, the overbearing nature of the national state and its profoundly entrenched narratives of republican legitimacy make it extremely difficult to step out from under their shadow now that the political, economic and social landscape is so different. Yet this is not to say that the social cannot be reinvented, along with a new version of citizenship appropriate to the pluralism of contemporary French society and the complexity of the modern world.

Conclusion Millennium talk

In an essay on the tragic nature of the twentieth century entitled L'Humaniti perdue, Alain Finkielkraut (1996) meditates on the ways in which the modern ideals of humanity and civilization-which scientific progress would make a reality-have been accompanied by the greatest inhumanity the world has ever known. 'Science and barbarity' (1996:110) is a fitting paradox to define the age. According to Finkielkraut, the dehumanization wrought by Nazism in a Germany at the forefront of scientific and cultural developments is only half the story of the paradox of the twentieth century. The other half has occurred since the Holocaust and has been ushered in by more recent scientific and cultural developments, especially those in information and communication. Finkielkraut suggests that, far from liberating humanity, these developments have forced humanity down another blind alley: the electronic revolution, which has provided us with the means to abolish distances, to communicate with others across differences and to be truly cosmopolitan, has in fact converted us all, quite simply, into brain-dead tourists in a global amusement park: 'Everyone a tourist, tourists for ever!' This is the ultimate outcome of the quest for emancipation and fraternity. Today the noble spirit of cosmopolitanism no longer signifies what Hannah Arendt .. . terms 'the desire to share the world with other people'; instead it signifies the globalization of the self. No longer is it that expanded consciousness so admirably defined by Kant as the ability to undertake a mental journey towards other points of view; instead it is the expansion of subjectivity and the inherent quality of 'global man' finally released from limbo. (Finkielkraut 1996:156) Finkielkraut's cfluque of today's bogus emancipation and cosmopolitanism, which simply masks a tourist's (or voyeur's) approach

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to others and the world, is echoed by a number of French commentators. Regis Debray also berates the crassness of those who confuse today's individualistic and hedonistic cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism (propelled by advanced technology) with genuine solidarity with others. Etienne Balibar (1998:117-118) warns of the siren calls of liberation offered by this 'postmodern Utopia' and ' fascination for the possibilities of the new "virtual world'" which might simply be the seductive surface of contemporary globalized commodity capitalism. We have already noted how the lure of surfaces in the city and the stimulation of ceaseless differentiation are possibly a hollow gloss obscuring the accelerating commodification of social relations and the obliteration of a moral relationship with 'the other'. According to Finkielkraut, postmodern humanitarianism is none other than the betrayal of humanity by science for a second time this century, after the first disaster wrought by Nazi genocide. Finkielkraut (1996:160) finishes his meditation by asking rhetorically what indeed has been the point of the twentieth century. As with previous works (cf. especially 1987), Finkielkraut's reading of history is schematic and reductionist in the extreme and his perspective that of a die-hard Enlightenment humanist and republican universalist. Yet the link he makes between Nazi dehumanization and postmodern 'humanitarianism' is not without interest, whatever the dangers of making broad analogies of this sort (see, for example, the discussion on Nazism and deconstruction in Chapter 1). The point is that after the nightmare of totalitarian dictatorships earlier in the century, which obliterated a moral relationship to ' the other', we might be entering a new nightmare which will once again obliterate the moral dimension to relationships, not, this time, through state-planned genocide (although this has certainly not been eradicated in some parts of the world) but through the technological appropriation of 'reality' and superficial humanitarianism at the behest of advanced capitalism. If the former system (in its Nazi incarnation) used the category of 'race' to classify diverse communities Qews, homosexuals, gypsies) as sub-species, the latter aestheticizes 'the other' for the purpose of sensual stimulation and self-gratification. This is what Gilles Lipovetsky (1987 :300) has called a 'neo-narcissistic age' in which ' the other' has become merely 'a means of being oneself. And although Lipovetsky (1987:327) believes that the new 'individualist logic' which predominates today is no longer premised on the eradication of 'the other', a bleaker view of contemporary processes would suggest instead that they may be leading (by other means) to the same effacement of the disturbing strangeness and difference of 'otherness' as that carried out under the

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banner of the heady ideologies of modernity. Indeed, as Tzvetan Todorov (1998:13) suggests, the abolition of memory and the real produced by the overabundance of information in contemporary societie s may be a far more effective way of eradicating 'otherness' and plunging us into a new 'realm of barbarity' because it goes under the name of democracy rather than that of totalitarianism, and therefore receives our willing consent rather than provokes our resistance. In an explicit comparison between the Holocaust and today's 'real time' (which abolishes all distinctions between past, pre sent and future), Jean Baudrillard (1997:59) is certainly in no doubt that 'today's real time is our mode of extermination'. In L'Art du moteur, Paul Virilio (1993: 171 -172) compares Nazi eugenics and contemporary developments in bio-technology in a similar warning against the technological production of the human. Virili o's fear is that the human body is seen more and more in terms of a constantly accelerating machine (1993:158) . Using Marinetti's famous declaration in the Futurist Manifesto of 191 O- 'let us prepare for the next and inevitable identification of Man and machine' -he argues, 'eighty years later we h ave re ached this state with the mass production of "ORGANOIDS" resulting from bio-technical research' (1993:165). Once again the aims of each version of eugenics are different, in keeping with the demands of the age. Today it is no longer a question of the purification of the race (which was the motor behind Nazi eugenics) but rather the obsession with youth, the healthy body, the sporty body, the l ong- life body, which underpins the technological intervention in the life-proce ss: We do not simply want to live better... but to live more forcefullY, to develop the nervous intensity of life by the ingestion of biotechnological products which will supplement other foods, and chemical products which provide greater or lesser degrees of stimulus. To be in really 'good health' in the future, will we have to be constantly doped up and artificially stimulated, like top sportsmen and women? (Virilio 1993:157) Virilio sees this manipulation of the body as part of the wider process of the technological 'visuali zation' of the real which ha s become our habitual landscape today. His universe is akin to that of Jean-Luc Godard's brilliant dystopic portrayal of contemporary society in Alphaville (1965) (which also equates totalitarian dehumanization with the scientific rationalization of the city). 1Like Eddy Constantine's

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Lemmy Caution, whose mission is to destroy the l ogic of the computer-controlled city through riddles, humour, poetry and good old-fashioned love, Virilio seeks the density, ambiguity and strangeness of life beyond the two-dimensional recuperation of reality through technology. Virilio therefore views the technological appropriation of reality as a sign of the tragic demise of humanity. The prophecy of Laurence's father in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles images (1966:40) expresses the same sentiment: 'Soon technology will seem to us like nature itself and we will live in a completely inhuman world.' Both Finkielkraut and Virilio (though in very different ways) raise perhaps the single most fascinating question at the time of the new millennium: will advances in market-driven techno-science today, especially those in genetic engineering and the electronic transmission of information, betray humanity once again following the connections earlier in the twentieth century between science, eugenics and genocide? Or is there the possibility of a new 'ethical' humanity which, instead of detaching science from morality, responsibility and democracy, attempts to consider their complex and multifaceted interconnections? Finkielkraut and Virilio, like many of the other French commentators I have considered in this book, provide a pessimistic response to these questions. They tend to view contemporary developments through dark fin-de-siecle spectacles. Their version of humanity is the Enlightenment version. Contemporary developments are judged by Enlightenment criteria, and found wanting. This reaction to postmodernity is certainly not confined to France alone, as I have noted on numerous occasions. Yet it is indicative of a major French approach to the crisis of modernity. The republican tradition, an assimilationist model of the nation (whether real or imagined), a strong and centralized state, an abstract and universalist version of citizenship, a faith in the rationalization of social life, an elitist structure to maintain the hierarchical ordering of the public and private spheres: these are all powerful markers of 'a certain idea of France', and of human civilization in general, whose possible demise many bemoan. Contemporary 'democratization' is often equated with American imperialism and an impoverishment of values; difference and pluralism are deemed to be responsible for the fragmentation of society; hedonism and the gratification of the senses herald the end of rational 'Man'. The air therefore resounds largely to the despairing cries of those who conflate the death of the humanist subject with the death of humanity itself and whose only vision beyond modernity is nihilism, chaos and despair. 'What are we,' says Pierre Nora, responding to the accusation of the pessimism of French intellectuals, 'o ther than

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pedagogues of the tragic?' ('Quinze ans de "Debat''', Le Monde des Livres) 6 October 1995). However, as I have also attempted to argue in this book, for those who know that the re-creation of modern ideals of humanity is no longer viable (let alone desirable after totalitarianism and the Holocaust), and that the sovereign and autonomous rational humanist subject must be consigned to history, a new realism can be detected which refuses to interpret the crisis of modernity either as unmitigated tragedy or as the unequivocal dawning of a new postmodern democracy. Edgar Morin, for example, acknowledges the shattered dreams of a modernity whose vision of progress was founded on the redemptive powers of science. He is also aware of the ethical dangers and potentially devastating effects today of a 'techno-scientific-bure aucracy' acting in the service of economic profit rather than the enhancement of life, which would constitute 'a new barbarism' (Morin and Kern 1993: 109). Yet for Morin (unlike Finkielkraut, Virilio and others) advances in techno-science do not necessarily, in themselves, le ad to the destruction of civilized communication with others. It is rather these developments divorced from any moral dimension which poses a problem for humanity. The architect Paul Chemetov (1994) argues a similar case with regard to the city: soluti ons to problems can never be simply technical but must involve, instead, a consideration of the wider social, political and, especially, ethical dimensions. Morin's awareness of the absence of responsibility which accompanie s ' techno-bureaucratic' overspeciali zation is a necessary starting-p oint for an alternative vision which, in Morin's words, would be ' a politics of civilization in which solidarity, conviviality, morality, ecology, and quality of life are no longer considered separately but conceived as a whole' ('Le discours absent', Le Monde, 22 April 1995; d. Morin and Kern 1993). We noted in the previous chapter that Morin's conception of a new 'politics of civilization' (Morin and Nair 1997) is founded on a more holistic view of the complex networks of contemporary life, as opposed to those approaches which divorce science from ethics, or rational thought from the affective life of the individual. In his most recent work, Alain Touraine (1992 and 1994) also talks of bringing together mind and body, the abstract and the concrete ('rationalization' and 'subjectivization') in a way which breaks with the binary structures of Cartesian-inspired Enlightenment thought. Even Jean Baudrillard, not noted for his optimistic forecasts for humanity, reminds us that rethinking the binary structures of Western modernity might be the path towards a new form of civilization beyond Enlightenment humanism which, paradoxically, would signal a return to pre-

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Enlightenment modes of understanding humanity. He observes (1997: 174) that 'our modernity is defined by the humanist perspective of the Enlightenment, but what preceded us was much larger than this version of humanism and was not founded on its distinction between the human and the inhuman'. What Alain Mine has defined as a new state of uncertainty reminiscent of the Middle Ages (with increasing areas of human activity escaping the order and authority of the modern age and possibly signifying ' the return to the law of the jungle', Mine 1993:68) is nevertheless the chance for a new way forward. As he observes, 'we must found our thought on the basis of what is uncertain with the same care that, previously, we founded our thought on the basis of what was probable' (Mine 1993:11). The ideas expressed above demonstrate that the crisis of modernity is perceived in France not only as tragedy but also, by some, as the chance for a reconsideration of the modern vision of humanity. Postmodern, post-colonial and post-national developments have opened up new spaces for the recreation of social life, and the hierarchical structures which held in place a single image of 'the human' have given way to a more pluralistic vision of humanity. For a growing number of French commentators it has become clear that the modern distinction between 'the human' and 'the inhuman' can no longer be maintained; as Baudrillard (1997:55) has remarked, 'when one attempts to define humanity by excluding what is inhuman it becomes a derisory enterprise'. Forged in the white heat of modernity in the name of a new transcendent humanity, yet implicated eventually in the most inhuman acts the world has ever seen, the modern abstract notion of 'the human' (founded on the legitimacy of science and rational thought) is today being seriously rethought. The fears of thinkers like Regis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut and Paul Virilio are real enough but present too bleak a picture of the French approach to postmodern developments. In the light of modern history, many now refuse to grant science, technical soluti ons and abstract concepts the legitimacy they once had. Instead, they are submitted to an intense ethical scrutiny so that advances in technoscience are constantly related to the wider questions of individual life and human solidarities. As I suggested in the introduction to this book, these new ethical concerns do not guarantee the safety of 'the other' under postmodern conditions. However, they do signal a passionate concern with redrawing the boundaries of humanity today and rethinking democracy beyond the traditional republican framework .

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Whatever pathways are pursued in the new millennium for the redefinitions of humanity and democracy, it is unlikely that any single one will be elevated to the realm of universal principle and provide the foundations for a new Utopian model to be adopted elsewhere, as with the Enlightenment. Yet this would be no bad thing, since we now know that Utopias can end up as dystopias and that universal visions of humanity can breed monstrous inhumanity. Facing postmodernity in France means coming to terms with the shortcomings of the Enlightenment. And just as French ideas were at the heart of the Enlightenment project itself, so too are they now stimulating the reconstruction of 'the human' beyond the Enlightenment.

Notes

Introduction Whether the contempo rary scene is bes t d efined as late mo dernity, accelerated m o d e rnity, re fl exive m o d ernizati o n o r p os tm o d ernity see m s to m e less impo rtant than the analysis o f social and c ultural change itself. Frequently p ropo nents o f these different d efinitio n s are di sting ui shable o nly thro ugh the d e finiti o n s th em selves , whe reas th e anal yses o ft en sh ow much co mm o n gro und. I p ropose no t to ge t embroiled in a d ebate o n d efinitio n s, which can be arcane and sterile. I am ado pting 'pos tmo d ernity' througho ut the tex t as an umbrella term to refer to th e crisis in the struc tures o f mo dernity and the new config uratio n s o f contempo rar y social and c ultural life in France.

1 In the shadow of the Holocaust RaphaeJle Rerolle and N icolas Weill m ake a similar o b ser vatio n in L e M onde des Livres ('La parole centre l'ex terminatio n', 25 February 1994) when they no te that, in the immediate pos t-war perio d, th e arch e typal concentratio n camp was Buchen wald rather than A usch witz. 2 T hi s re tros pective 'clean sing ' o f France started as early as the trial o f the Vichy leader, Marshall P e tain, in 1945. As Chri stian D elacampagne (1994:1 24) points o ut, France was then de picted as a co untry where 'n o bo d y (or almos t no bo d y) had really been anti-Semitic '. 3 'The sur vivor s arrived h o m e at a time when th e Cold War was beginning to transfo rm perspectives and when , o nly a few m o nth s after Lib eratio n , sto ries o f martyrdom seemed to belo ng to ano ther age' (Rerolle and Weill, 'La parole centre l'exterminatio n', L e M onde des L ivres) . 4 E lsewh ere Anne tte Wievio rka d es cribes this contex t as compri sing th e attempt to unify the fate o f all the depo rtees b y making all the camps Birkenau and Buchen wald, Dachau and Treblinka-one single m ythical camp, o pen ed in 19 33 and liberated in 1945, in which everyone, Jews and n o nJews, experienced the same fate. N uit et brouillard is emblematic o f this visio n. (A.Wievio rka 1992:434)

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5 Annette Wievio rka dates the use in France o f the word 'Sho ah' (which is the H ebrew fo r disaster) from the 1980s (1992:436 , no te 3) . 6 G eorge Steiner has d es cribed th e Holo caust as marking the tragic nature o f o ur own times in the following term s: Using theological m e tapho r s, and there is no need to ap ologiz e fo r them in an ess ay o n culture, o ne may say that the ho lo caust marks a seco nd Fall. We can interpret it as a voluntar y exit fr o m th e Garden and a programmatic attempt to burn the Garden b ehind us.... With the bo tched attempt to kill G o d and the ver y nearly success ful attempt to kill those who had "invented" Him, civilizatio n entered, precisely as N ietz sche had fo re told, "on night and m o re night" . (Steiner 1971:42) 7 In L e DifJerend, Lyo tard makes the distinction be tween difJerend (in which the he terogen eity and unfixed nature o f the name is o f prime imp o rtance) and litige (in which a solutio n is achieved and hence a clos ure o f m eaning) . In thi s schema, the state o f I srael is th erefo re a recuperatio n o r naturalizatio n o f that which canno t o r must no t be recuperated: The difJerend attached to N azi names, to Hitler, Auschwitz and Eichmann, canno t b e transfo rmed into litige and regulated b y a verdict. T he shades o f those fo r who m no t o nly life but the expressio n o f the wrong d o ne to them was re fu sed by th e Final Solutio n co ntinue to roam indeterminately. In creating th e state o f I srael, the sur vivor s tran sfo rmed this wro ng into a damage and the difJerend into litig atio n. In so d oing , they put an end to the silence to which they had been co ndemned b y beginning to sp eak in the co mmo n idio m o f internatio nal law and co nventio nal p olitics. (Lyo tard 198 3:90) Fo r a di scussio n o f L yo tard's d es criptio n o f th e H olocaust as the maj o r difJerend, see M o ngin 1994a: 74. 8 Fo r a similarly m o no lithic co ncept o f 'the Wes t' , see, fo r ex ample, Ro b ert Yo ung 1990. Fo r a stimulating expose and problematizatio n o f thi s approach , see Cheye tte 1995. 9 A m o re nuanced presentatio n o f the H ellenic and H ebraic traditio n s, which at o nce co nfo unds the over-reductive antithesis underlying the above theories and replaces it with a tro ubling ambivalence, can perhap s be fo und in the fig ure o f the 'J ewgree k', Leopold Blum, in James J oyce's Ulysses. H ere the wandering Ulysses and the wandering Jew are fu sed rath er than placed in o ppositio n to each o th er (cf. Cheyette 199 3) . 10 T he co nfusio n be tween the allegorical use o f 'jews ' and the histo r y o f real Jews in Lyo tard's H eidegger et 'les )uifs ' (see, fo r ex ample, pp. 46 and 130) demo n strates the naive ty o f Lyotard's own d esire to disting uish between them. Why choose the term 'jew' in the fir st place if no t because o f the hi sto r y o f real J ews (cf. Boyarin and Boyarin 199 3:700) ?

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11 cf. the title o f D errida's ess ay o n Levinas mentioned previo usly, 'Violence et metaphysique' (Derrida 1967) . 12 Tzvetan Tod o rov (1994:124-125) believes that Blancho t's 'co n ver sio n' is compromised b y the fact that his condemnatio n during the 1980s o f the antiSemitism o f o ther s (no tably Paul Valer y's anti-Drey fu s eng agem ent at the beginning o f this century and Martin H eidegger's N azism during the 1930 s) contrasts markedly with his silence abo ut his own adherence, between 1936 and 1938, to the beliefs o f Action Franc;:aise and his signed articles in the ex treme right-wing jo urnal Combat 'in which Jews were savaged and regularly associated with Bolshevism ' (p. 124). Fo r a critique o f Blancho t's early anti-Semitism in Combat, see Mehlman 1983. See also Jean-Pierre Faye (Faye and Vilaine 1993:36) who comments no t only on Blancho t but o n o ther French intellectuals who have attempted to marry the co ntradicto ry tendencies o f Ado rno 's vision o f writing after A uschwitz and Heideggerian philosophy. He recalls how Adorno him self could never understand the French fascination with Heidegger. 13 cf. Handelman: In hi s essay o n 'Jabes and the ques tio n o f the Boo k', D errida traces the connection between the Jew and writing, defining Judaism precisely as " the birth and passion o f writing .. . the love and endurance o f the letter itself" . . .. For the Jew-and the poet- the boo k becomes folded and bo und to itself, infinitely self-reflective, its own subj ect and its own representation. T he home o f the Jew and the poet is the text; they are wanderers, born o nly o f the book. But the freedo m o f the poe t d epend s, in D errida's interpre tation, o n the breaking o f the tablets o f the law (slaying Moses again) . . .. Bo th the poet and the Jew must write and must comment, because bo th poetry and commentary are for m s o f exiled speech, but the poet need n o t be faithful nor bo und to any original text. (Handelman 1982:1 75-176) 14 cf. Mongin 1996a: 237: 'We have moved from a representation o f the world facing the future to that o f a timid approach to what will come to pass.' 15 U nlike Alain Res nai s's Nuit et brouillard, which mixes archive foo tage with contemporary sho ts o f the camps in an unsettling m ovement between past and present, Lanzmann's film avoids all use o f documentary material, and therefore ges tures towards an absent past (which canno t be represented) o nly thro ugh the tentative gropings o f present-day witnesses and locatio ns. 16 E lsewhere, Lyotard (1990:11 4) similarly condenses E uropean history into a fairly mo nolinear story by conflating 'Christian E urope', republicanism and liberalism in their effacing o f ' the o ther'. Talking o f ' the Jewish book', he says, ' this is what E urope-first Christian then republican and now liberal and permissive-refuses to know abo ut or will simply never understand'. In this sam e article, Lyotard sweepingly equates E urope's anti-Semitism with the 'self-constitution' o f the self characteristic o f E urope's q ues t for to tality. 17 See especially Critical Inquiry 1989. O ne o f the contributors to this special iss ue, Jean-Marie Apos tolides, no tes the following:

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What is indeed striking in decon struction is that it escapes confrontatio n with historical development. That does no t imply that it is linked to rightist tho ught (its technique can be used either for 'fascist' o r 'liberal' purposes), but it implies that thi s m e tho d rarely co nfronts hi sto ricity, b ecause his to ry reveal s the 'decidable', which sometimes means guilt. (Apos tolides 1989:766) 18 Verges was alre ady ren ow n ed fo r equating Fre nch atr o cities during th e Algerian War with N azi crimes during th e Seco nd Wo rld War (th o ugh h ere too he was m er ely appropriating arg ument s which o riginally started life o n th e anti-colo nial Le ft during the Algerian War itself) . Kritzman (1995a: 6) o b ser ves that 'Verges 's evo catio n o f thi s " re turn o f the repressed" end s up b y be co ming a gro tes que fo rm o f manipulatio n, ano th er example o f th e ass assinatio n o f m em o r y which entail s a re pe titio n o f the pain o f loss '. 19 G eo rges Be n so u ss an lo cates th e sam e proble m c o nc e rnin g th e particularizatio n o r th e ge n eralizatio n o f th e Sho ah, but uses differe nt ex amples to d em o n strate thi s os cillatio n: The hi sto r y o f th e geno cide o f th e J ews is threatened b y slippages in interpre tatio n. Fo r som e, the event is ab sorb ed into a general co ntinuum in which all th e di sas te r s o f J ewish hi s to r y ar e sub sum e d within th e comm em o ratio n o f Ticha BIi Av o r 9 Av, the date o f the d es truc tio n o f the Seco nd Temple . ... T hi s is the crude religio us di sco ur se which d enies the Sho ah its radical uniquen ess. Fo r o ther s, th e event is seen only in term s o f its ab solute uniqueness, d en ying any interpre tatio n which wo uld place it within an hi sto rical and ratio nal fram ewo rk and thu s clo thing it in th e single di sco ur se o f th e ' unutterable ' and 'indes cribable '. (Ben so ussan 1994:95-96) (c f. Bedarida 199 7:218-219) It is precisely thi s 'political minefi eld' that the British arti st Rachel Whiteread stepped into when she was asked to design a m em o rial in Vienna to A ustrian Jews killed in the H olo caust (see Lynn MacRitchie , 'T h e war over Rach el', Guardian, 5 Novemb er 1996) . 20 Lyo tard sugges t s precisely th e o pposite. It is re presentatio n s o f A uschwitz which are e quival e nt to th e N azi p o lic y o f effacing th e tra ces o f ex terminatio n, since th e fo rm er (like the latter) are al so ways o f fo rge tting th e crime (see L yo tard 1988b: 49-5 0) . T h e p o le mic pitting representatio nali st s ag ains t anti-r epresentatio nali st s wa s particularly bitter at the time o f th e o pening o f Steven Spielberg 's film o n the H o lo caust, S chindler's L ist. Claude Lanzmann called Spielb erg 's ficti o nalizatio n o f th e H olo caust a tran sgressio n o f th e fo rbidde n (o f the unrepresentability o f A usch witz) (L e M onde, 3 M arch 1994) , while Pierre Billard re to rted b y calling Lanzmann, Raul Hilberg and o th ers ' the n ew fundam entali sts' (L e Point, 12 M arch 1994) . Fo r a full er d is cussio n , see L ehrer 1994. 21 Cornelius Casto riadi s (1996:89) highlight s what h e sees as the co ntradictio n inherent in ' the deco n struc tio ni st m ys tificatio n which condemn s th e project o f the H ellenic Wes t' given that the 'sophists' wh o collapse Wes tern ver sio n s

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of emancipation into ex trem e forms of totalitarianism are thems elves ' not re ticent about occasionally posing as th e d e fe nders of justice, d e mocracy and human rights'. 22 T he notion o f the 'tragic' nature o f the modern concept of history signified b y the Holocaust unites a number of different thinkers, including L yo tard, Jiirgen Habermas and George Steiner, although th e conclusions th ey draw from thi s shared pre mis e ar e ve r y diffe r e nt. As r egards Lyo tard and Habermas, for ex ample, if the form er reads this trage dy in te rms of th e end of ratio nality and the end o f modernity, th e latter (as suggested above) sees it as th e sign of th e failure only of 'instrumentalist' rationality and cons equently as a sign o f the unaccompli shed task o f m odernity to effec t real fr eedom and emancipation.

2 New racisms This ambivalence was mirrored in thos e who were at the receiving end of modern forms of 'othering'. As both Bauman (1991 a) and Gilroy (1993) have shown, they were both inside and o utside social structures at the sam e time. 2 Clearly this is not m eant to imply that concepts of difference were employed for th e first time after the Second World War. The Negritude m ovem ent before the war is a good example o f the anti-colonial challenge to univer salist hypocris y through the adoption o f differentialist criteria (see H o us e 1997) . 3 For an example of Benoist's approach, see Benoist 1986. The title, Europe, tiers monde, meme combat, illustrates the way in which Benoist explo its an antiWestern, Third World di sco ur se for hi s own ends. It is not difficult to see how his argument co uld simply b e mistaken for a le ft-wing anti-imperialist d e fenc e o f o ppressed p eo ple thr o ugh th e proclamatio n o f th e 'right to differ enc e' . Fo r a d e taile d discu ssio n o f L evi-Strauss's more r ece nt proclamatio n s o n th e subj ec t , see Taguieff's chapter entitled "'Raci sm e" : usages e t m es usages. A Partir d e L evi-S trau ss', Taguie ff 1995a: 9-20. For a brief survey o f the ambiguous use o f the concept o f difference, see al so Adler 1997. 4 c f. Renan's statem ent s at th e same tim e o n th e ine quality o f rac es. For example: It would be extending the pantheist concept o f history to an absurd ex treme to place all races on an equal foo ting and, according to the belief that human nature is always beautiful, to sugges t that o ne can find in all the different races the same fullness and richness. I am therefore the first to recognize that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, is an inferior manifes tatio n o f human nature. (cited in Todorov 1989:1 70) 5 T his fo rmula fo r the shift be tween modern and pos tmo dern forms o f racism runs counter to what Colette Guillaumin asserted in 1972 in an article entitled 'The specific characteristics o f raci st ideology' (translated in Guillaumin 1995) .

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6 Even if it is true that there are co n siderable differences be tween the Front N atio nal and the ideas o f Benoist, es pecially concerning immig ratio n (Adler 1995) , n evertheless, o n a m o re general level, they b o th exploit the logic o f c ultural differentialism. 7 Fo r a co ncise ver sio n o f Wievio rka's analysis, see Chapter 1, entitled 'La g rande mutatio n', in Wievio rka 1992:25-41 o r his chapter entitled 'C ulture, socie te e t d em ocratie ' in Wievio rka, ed., 199 7:11-60. 8 Surpri singly, give n h is habitual atte ntio n to th e natur e o f th e hi s to rical 'co njuncture ' in th e d e terminatio n o f social relatio n s and processes, E tienne Balibar ha s equated the ideology o f the Front N atio nal with fa scism (see 'D e la " preference natio nale" i l'invention d e la politique ' and 'Co ntre Ie fa scism e e t po ur la revolte ' in Balibar 1998:89-1 32 and 13 3-144, respectively) . Balibar sugges ts that the reductio n o f the plurality o f levels o f identificatio n to o ne single identificatio n , namely that o f the natio n (or, m o re specifically, ' the conElatio n o f the famil y and the natio n', p. 120) , and the o b sessio n with d es cendance and genealogy (p. 121 ) are precisely the characteri stic s which allow a co mpari son between fa scism and the Front N atio nal. Fo r m y own part, th e co mpari son o b scures m o re than it reveal s ab o ut the racializ ed natio nalism o f the Front N atio nal. 9 In France, Tag uie ff has been a victim o f this co nfusio n. His critiques o f antiracism and hi s fa scinatio n with Alain de Benoist have led som e to suspect hi s involvem ent with the New Right (see Roger-Po l Droit in L e M onde, 13 July 199 3) . Following a call b y a number o f intellectuals fo r greater vigilance in d ealings with (and hence giving legitimacy to) the New Right (reprinted in the same iss ue o f L e M onde), thi s political co rrectness 'i la franc;:ai se' was in turn d eno unced b y T ag uieff and o ther s who arg ue that new thinking around to day's problem s and th e critiqu e o f o ld 'le ft -wing ' id ea s sh o uld n o t auto matically b e mi staken fo r colluding with the enem y (see 'Y a- t-il une affaire T ag uie ff?', Globe H ebdo, 21-2 7 July 199 3; Michel Wievio rka, ' Qui es t vraiment d'extrem e droite?', Globe H ebdo, 28 July-3 A ug ust 1993; and 'Les d erapages d e la vigilance ', L e Nouvel Observateur, 12-18 A ug ust 1993) . 10 Fo r a critique o f Yonne t, see the contributio n s b y Lucien Karpik and M ichel Wievio rka in 'Auto ur du malaise fran c;:ai s', L e D Jbat 1993: 117-1 31. Fo r a critique o f Yonne t, and Bejin and Fre und, see Tod o ro v 1996:123-129. 11 T he o ppos itio n b e twee n unive r sali sm and diffe renc e is mirr o re d in th e di sc o ur se o n th e city o f integ ratio n (d la franraise) and segr egati o n (d l'atnJricaine).

3 City spaces Rather m o re tendentio usly, Ross arg ues (following L efeb vre, Casto riadis and Sartre) that th e imm o bilizatio n o f time and hi sto r y e ffected b y th e m o bility o f th e auto m o bile was echoed in th e 1960 s in th e 'h ygienic lang uage o f technique and e ffi ciency' o f bo th th e technocratic yo ung bureaucrat and th e intell e ctual s o f s tructurali s m wh o provid e d th e n ew manage rial b o urgeoisie with its 'ideological legitimatio n, its intellectual veneer' (Ross

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1995:1 76-1 77) . In a fairl y reductive reading o f th e relatio n ship b e tween socio-eco n o mic d evelo pment s and intellectual m ovem ents, sh e includes the A nnales-s chool hi sto rians as al so co mplicit in legitimizing ' th e id eology o f capitali st m o d ernizatio n' and 'ma sking [its] social co ntradictio n s' (ibid., p. 190): Just as m od ernizatio n needed a new reco unting o f hi sto ry that would dissolve beginning and end into a natural, qua si-immo bile, 's patializ ed' process, a kind o f successio n o f immo bilities, so it needed a sys tem o f sign s that wo uld es tablish a co mmo n intellectual c urrency, so to speak, be tween the vario us intellectual di sciplines, a ne twork o f 'communicatio n' b y which to trace the buried structures co mmo n to all social life. (ibid., p. 191 )

2 cf. the o b ser vatio n o f the architec t Paul Chem e tov (1994:65): 'Re flectio n s o n th e city necessitate m o re gen eral re fl ec tio n s o n h ow to fo und to day n ew conce pts o f life in the City, citizen ship and the social co ntract.' 3 cf. K eith (1995): O n the o n e hand the precario usness o f the fLine ur losing him self [sic] in the crowd always lead s to an immer sio n in the stree t but al so, th ro ugh immer sio n in the crowd, to an identificatio n with and fe ti shisatio n o f the commo dity. So that the flane ur, o nce confronted with the d epartment sto re, find s that 'he roamed thro ugh the labyrinth o f m erchandise as he had o nce roamed thro ugh the lab yrinth o f the city' (in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of H igh Capitalism). Making contradicto r y sen se o f o neself in the stree t is abo ut locating the b o dy in th e possibly incommen surable matrices o f eco no m y and c ulture. (K eith 1995:304)

4 cf. Michael Sheringham 's o b ser vatio n s (1995:211) o n the work o f M arc A uge: ' For A uge th e cri sis o f identity is a cri sis o f alterity. We used to kn ow where the o ther was, now the o ther is ever ywhere: the dangers o f dem o nizatio n and exclusio n are ac ute.' 5 As a middle- class intellectual whose ho m e is in the centre o f P ari s, Mas pero fo regro und s hi s m o bility in relatio n to the relative lack o f m o bility o f those h e e n co unte r s. Similarly, b y re fe rring o n num er o us occasio n s to th e p roblematic links between 'centre' and ' periphery' (according to who is doing the speaking o r the o b ser ving) he fo regro und s the different relatio n ship s to city spaces o f these middle- class intellectual s vis-a-vis those o thers (fo r the m os t part wo rking- class and ver y o ft en o f immig rant bac kgro unds), th eir different capacities fo r fr eed o m and choice. 6 c f. O livier Mo ngin's tren ch ant critique o f wha t h e term s ' the d em ocra tic U to pia' to d ay: T he o nly h o riz o n o f the d emocratic U to pia is the present. It makes the individual believe that he lives in a present which co nden ses all hi sto ry and

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a wo rld which conde n ses all space. It d evo ur s time and space-those main stays o f all experience. (Mongin 1994a:15) Like M aspero, Mongin (ibid., 25) seeks to reintegrate time and space and hence to o pp ose ' the tendency to day [which] works instead to se parate them and to privilege a time witho ut space and a space in which hi sto rical time no longer has any real sen se'.

4 Cultural debates Regis D ebray (1993:11 7) d efin es Ie culture! as 'what happen s to culture when it is televised'. 2 cf. M o ngin: The space o f the republican school has beco m e fragm ented into claims fo r ethnic identity and c ultural individualism. It seem s that th e interpre tatio n o f c ultur e ha s b ec o m e culturalis t, relativi s t and differ e ntiali s t. T hi s interpre tatio n has n ow taken over from the republican co nception which had the m erit o f unifying and hierarchizing behavio ur within the fram ewo rk o f state schooling. (M o ngin 1994a:190) (c f. Finkielkraut and Gauche t 1988) 3 I have di scussed elsewhere (Silverman 1992) the problematic nature o f thi s binar y o ppositio n between France and G ermany, and es pecially the way in which Renan is habitually m o bilized to suppo rt it, after hi s conver sio n in the 1870s from an ethnic natio nalist positio n (emblematic o f the 'German mo del') to o ne o f republican universalism (emblematic o f the ' French mo del') . 4 Mongin dem on strates how the 'ethnological interpretation' o f culture co n verts culture fr o m an act o f creatio n into an already acquired attribute o f an individual o r co mmunity: Pushing the e thnological interpre tatio n o f the 19 70s to its ex trem e- that po pular culture as well as high culture d eser ves res pect-the approach to culture now favo ur s the claim s to difference made b y marginal cultures and underlines th e impo rtance o f th e culture o f the co mmunity o f belo nging .... This exten sio n o f the n o tio n o f c ulture prog ressively reinfo rces the idea that c ulture is bo th a given and an acquired trait in that it is either the individual's claim to identity o r the d esire to preser ve the culture o f the ethnic group o r community o f belo nging. (Mongin 1994a:189) H ence, to fo rmulate this d evelo pment using the dich o to m y be tween France and G ermany employed b y Finkielkraut and Fumaroli, the human proj ect o f the 'Enlightenment' versio n o f c ulture gives way to the ethnic c usto m s o f the 'G erman' m o d el. D o minic Wolto n's critique o f what he calls 'cultural televisio n' (that is, thematic programming according to ethnic/ cultural identity)

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in favour o f 'a generalist televisio n' also correspends to a universalistic visio n o f c ulture (i la Lo rd Reith?) which will provide so cial co hesio n and prevent ghettoizatio n according to specialization (see Wolton 1990) . 5 Daniele Sallenave's book L e Don des morts adopts a similar perspective with regard to the los t golden age o f the book. Interes tingly, Sallenave makes explicit the links between literature, the modern city and the age o f E nlightenment which are to day threatened by mo ney and profit (and the image), and in which 'art itself risks becoming a simple commodity amo ng o thers'. She muses nos talgically on 'the U topia o f city life, the life with books, and the life o f the community o f Man in a fr ee space in which we will silently reawaken the life o f the pas t' (1991:19) . Fo r a critique o f Fumaroli, see Ro man 1991. Fo r a critique o f Finkielkraut, Fumaroli, and Sallenave, see Rigaud 1990:395-402. For a tourd'horizon o f these debates (including the positio n o f Rigaud himself) in the contex t o f developments in French cultural policy, see David Looseley's excellent book The

Politics if Fun (1995). 6 Mike Featherstone also locates the breakdown o f the divisio n between art and everyday life as crucial to pos tmo dernism: If we examine d efinition s o f pos tmo dernism we find an emphasis o n the effacem ent o f the bo undary between art and everyday life, the collapse o f the distinctio n between high art and mass/ po pular c ulture, a general stylistic promiscuity and playful mixing o f codes. (Featherstone 1991 :65) 7 E hrenberg is also targeting Laurent Cohen-Tanugi here, but one might easily put Paul Yonnet in the same category (see Cohen-Tanugi 1993 and Yonnet 1985). 8 It is useful here to think o f Z ygmunt Bauman's no tio n o f the ambivalent statu s o f mo d ern co unter-c ultures which Paul Gilroy (199 3) exploits in term s o f the 'do uble con scio usness ' o f black intellec tuals in the m o d ern perio d , bo th inside and o utside the frontiers o f m o dern society; o r indeed o f E tienne Balibar's no tio n o f 'determin ed o pposites'. 9 c f. Kumar 1995:114: 'Knowledge in its pos tmo dern fo rm , is no t simply a c ultural ex tru sio n o f pos t-industrial socie ty; it is an aspect precisely o f the knowledge socie ty.' See also L yo tard's d efin itio n o f c ulture in L e DifJerend (1983 :2 59) : 'The word culture already signifies the circ ulatio n o f info rmatio n rather than the work to be accomplished in o rder to be able to present what is n o t presentable.' 10 c f. Balandier: T he m edia age is accompanied b y the perman ent power o f images and th ere fo re th e con straint to fo und p ower o n images. However, th e continual flow o f spec tac ular images reduces everything to o n e level and e ffaces the di stance and separatio n witho ut which the political sphere h as no space o f its own. What is secret (one o f the weapo ns o f those who govern) is there fo re replaced with noise. (Balandier 1985:11 )

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11 Gilles Lip ove tsky lo cates the same process when he talks o f: expression at all cos ts, the primacy o f the act o f communication over the nature o f what is communicated, indifference towards content, the playful abso rptio n o f meaning, co mmunication with no goals and no public, the addresser who has beco me his/ her own addressee. Hence this over-abundance o f spectacles, exhibitio n s and interio rs. .. and the need to express o neself whatever the 'message', the narcissistic pleasure d erived from expression for no end o ther than expression itself (and the right to do this) , but transmitted and amplified by a medium. (Lipovetsky 1983:23) 12 T he bizarre phenomeno n o f the public reactio n to the d eath o f Princess Diana in A ug ust 199 7 is a goo d example o f this 'co ntinuum o f star and punter'. Regis D ebray sees the adulatio n o f Diana and the d ecline in the fo rtunes o f the res t o f the British m o narchy in terms o f the struggle between m o d ern symbolic fo rmality and po stmo d ern 'fu sio nal' informality ('sen sor y and tactile culture, humanitarian c o mpa ssio n, id o latr y o f the b o d y and proximity'), leading eventually (altho ugh no t quite o n this o ccasio n) to the victory o f the law o f the heart over the law itself, o f the ho riz ontal over the vertical, o f the Index over the Symbol, in which the sign is stuck to the object itself, like the pho tograph, rather than distanced from the object, like the word (to use Pierce's terms). ('Admirable Angleterre', L eMonde, 10 September 1997) Jean-Pierre Le G o ff's damning criticism o f the 'socie ty o f spectacle' al so seem s particularly relevant to this pheno m eno n: The spectacle and the cult o f emotio n and lived experience confuse the distinction s between the imaginary and the real, between what is tolerable and what is intolerable. T he emo tional impact co unts fo r more than ratio nal debate and the exchange o f arguments. Words lose their sense for immediacy and feeling is all that really matters, which mean s that the situation is ripe fo r all sorts o f manipulation. (Le G o ff 1996:219) See also Pierre Chambat and Alain E hrenberg's discussion (199 3) o f television 'reality shows ' which blur the distinctio n between private and public, spectator and star. (Fo r a general di scussio n o f 'reality shows ', see Dauncey 1997.) 13 D ebray's discussio n o f the tran sfo rmatio n fr o m the 'republican' school to to day's 'd em o cratic' school highlights the centrality o f th e republican e thos in the fo rmatio n o f Ie peuple, and the danger to the natio n when the state embraces a d em o cratic co ncept o f Ie peuple: People and School were the two historical faces o f the republican Janus, since the concept o f a Republic is first and forem os t pedagogic .... To reno unce the

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duty to teach lead s to taking social fac ts as n o rm s and replacing the 'general will' with collective p sychology, which is what the demagogic state does, som e times in the name o f d em o cracy. (D ebray 199 3:83) 14 L e G o ff makes the same point in relatio n to info rmatio n: T he over-abundance o f info rmatio n kill s info rmatio n , d rown s everything in a sea o f equivalence, render s the event unrecognizable and contributes to th e d eath o f m eaning. Events and acto rs di sappear under the weight o f images and co mmentaries which resemble each o th er. T h e conto urs o f the real lose their con sistency in favo ur o f a fl ow o r magma o f prefabricated images and sentences repeated ad infinitum, as in a state o f hypnosis. (Le G o ff 1996:218) 15 E lsewhere Virilio ha s said: no t to read is to cease to make m ental images; it is to be a handicapped voyeur. . . . When o n e sees badly, o ne lives and walks badly.. . . T he cri sis o f mental images brings to a head an o ptical and oc ular blindness in which it beco m es impossible to recogniz e certain fo rm s and lead s to a loss o f intuition. It is well known that intuition d epends o n a look which is attentive to the smalles t de tails. (' Faire image ', Les Cahiers de Paris-V III, Saint-D eni s, P UV, p. 242, cited in Mongin 1994a:222) 16 In his critique o f the 'd em ocratic' nature o f the image, G eorges Balandier puts th e o ppositio n between republic and dem o crac y in the fo llowing term s: Genuine d em oc racy r equir es th e g rea tes t p oss ibl e loosening o f th ose de terminatio n s which condition o pinio n s, pre ferences and choices, while dem ocracy in th e hand s o f the m edia and th e g rand co mmunicato r s is condemned to disapp ear beneath a p o pulism whose autho ritarian nature is hidden b y the spectacle o f images. In the past the Re public was fo rtified by its insistence o n the c ult o f the textual and th e law. Today th e streng th o f dem ocracy d epend s o n the will to give to bo th o f these a place and a space to flo uri sh. (Balandier 1994:20 7) (cf. D ebray 1989)

17 Z ygmunt Bauman d e fin es th e way in which th e E nlig htenm e nt p ro ject stigmatiz ed po pular culture and life-s tyles as follows : Po pular, locally admini stered ways o f life were . . .co n stituted, from the perspective o f universali stic ambitio n s, as re trograde and backward-looking, a residue o f a different social o rder to be le ft behind; as imperfec t, immature stages in an overall line o f develo pment toward a 'true ' and univer sal way o f life, exemplified by the hegem o nic elite; as grounded in superstitio n o r er ror, passio n -ridden, infes ted with animal drives , and o therwise resisting

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th e e nn o bling influenc e o f th e trul y human- s h o rtl y to b e dubb e d 'enlightened' -order. (B auman 1992: 7-8)

18 See, fo r example, Alain To uraine who situates this approach to 'mass culture ' within th e wid er co ntex t o f th e Fre n ch E nlig htenm e nt and re publican intellec tual traditio n: T hose intellectuals who remain faithful to the heritage o f the E nlightenment too o ften tend to condemn mass society and judge it crass. T hey deno unce the impoverishment and dangers o f mass cultural con sumptio n and display their talent in criticizing this state o f affairs rather than in p roposing solution s.... T his attitude is precisely that o f the republican elite which has always wanted to conserve power within a narrow band o f enlightened citizens, those who have particular skills, o r even those con sidered to be qualified interpreters o f the meaning and direction o f history. (Touraine 1992:41 8)

19 It has been argued (Adkins and Leonard 1996) that French feminism has been 'rec uperated ' in a different way: the po pularizatio n in Am erica and Britain o f the linguistic and psycho analytical criticism o f Cixo us, Kristeva and Irigaray and its ab sorptio n into the Anglo-Am erican pos tstruc turalist critical traditio n o f the las t two d ecades has tended to effac e a different traditio n o f French feminis m (as epito mized b y the work o f Chris tine Delphy, Cole tte Guillaumin and Monique Wittig and the wom en's studies jo urnal, Questions jeministes) which presents a far m o re materialist critical approach. 20 cf. Michael Collins ('You must be joking ', Guardian, 14 July 1997) : 'If fig urative painting wo uld now be the m os t radical m ove in an art world colo ni sed b y the installatio n, the m os t revolutio nary ro ute in a televisio n racked b y halfar sed attempts at iro n y is. .. to go straight.' See al so, from a slightly different perspec tive, G ayatri Spivak: I find the demand on m e to be marginal always amusing .. .. I am tired o f dining o ut o n being an exile because that has a long traditio n and it is no t o ne I want to iden tify m yself with . . .. In a certain sen se, I think there is no thing that is central. T h e ce ntr e i s always co n s titut e d in t e rm s o f it s ow n marg inalit y. However . . .certain peoples have always been asked to cathect the margins so that o thers can be defined as central .. .in that situatio n the only strategic thing to do is to absolutely present o neself at the center. (quo ted in So ja and Hooper 1993:203)

21 c f. Le G o ff: T he link between intellectuals and the people constitutes a crucial element in the construction o f an education and a dynamic concept o f citizenship to which we must all contribute. 'To instil the spirit o f critical awareness into the masses', 'to create a popular versio n o f reason', to give everyone the o pportunity to

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access o ur cultural heritage, to form elites from the people. .. these ideals o f popular education can be reshaped today to form a new dynamism in the face o f the intellectual confusion which predo minates. (Le G o ff 1996:227) Fo r a critique o f Finkielkraut's positio n in relatio n to the school, see Pe ter s

1993. 22 A t a conference in Strasbo urg in 1993 (Carre fo ur des litteratures euro peennes d e Strasb o urg , re p o rte d as 'Le c ri du m o nd e ' in L e M onde des L ivres, 5 November 1993, pp. 27- 30), L yo tard's per sp ective was sh own to be in stark contrast to that o f Pierre Bo urdie u. Altho ugh Bo urdie u ag reed that 'we must be war y o f . . . the fig ure o f the intellectual as self-p roclaimed bearer o f the univer sal con science', he n evertheless believed that the intellec tual co uld still fulfil the role o f 'func tio nary fo r humanity' (p. 29).

5 Citizens all? As Lyo tard has said (1979: 72) , ' the principle o f a univer sal m e talang uage is re placed by that o f a plurality o f fo rmal and axio matic sys tem s'. 2 E lsewhere, N air (1992:46) puts this develo pment m o re succinctly: 'Behind the social loom s the e thnic, the c ultural and the confessio nal.' 3 N air (Morin and N air 1997:19 5-197) ado pts the classic antithesis be tween French re publicani sm and 'An glo-Saxo n' d em ocracy. In th e co ntex t o f a disc ussio n o f the future o f E uro pe, h e o b ser ves : if the fate o f the republican idea inaugurated b y the French Revolution is to suffer defeat at the hands o f the Anglo-Saxon idea o f individualist d em ocracy, regulated solely by the principle o f the market, then there is no reason whatsoever to defend that versio n o f E urope. (p. 196; see also p. 210)

4 cf. Judt (1992:154) who talks o f ' th e indigeno us antiliberali sm o f the French republican intelligentsia'. 5 A good example o f thi s backlas h is th e vigorou s revisio ni sm o f intellectual hi sto r y, wh ich we n o te d in th e previo us chapter, in th e wake o f th e disintegratio n o f th e fo rmer Cold War o rtho d oxies. T he vicio us attac ks o n what are d epicted as the m o rally blind, ho pelessly prescriptive, autho ritarian nature o f fo rmer g urus (far m o re ferocio us than an ything we see in Britain) are fr equently th e b earer s (eith er explicitly o r implicitly) o f a neo-lib eral d em oc ratic age nda and a r e n ewed inter es t in lib eral thinke r s like d e Tocqueville (see, fo r example, a number o f th e articles in th e influential jo urnal L e D ebat) . 6 Virilio expresses the same idea in the following way: Ab solute speed is the opposite o f dem ocracy, which pres upposes enco untering o thers, discussion, taking time to reflect and sharing in decisio n-making. If the

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consequence o f co ntinued acceleration is that we are left with no time to share, then democracy is truly impossible. (1996:97) 7 O ne thinks o f J o hn Majo r's 'Citizen s' charter' in the U K. Was this a charter fo r citizen s o r con sumers, and what was the di stinction between the two ? 8 Olivier Mongin (1994a:2 77-296) traces the roo ts o f thi s refo rmulatio n o f the relatio n ship between the individual and the world in term s o f the penetratio n, over recent years, o f A m erican social and p olitical theor y into the French intellectual traditio n. 9 Mongin makes a similar point when he says : accepting the principle o f democracy does no t necessarily mean a dogmatic acceptance o f the principles o f liberalism o r the rule o f 'public opinion' but rather a concern for the future shape o f the democratic adventure o f equality after the failure o f communist egalitarianism and in the face o f res urgent nationalism. (1994a:25) 10 See also Wee ks 199 3:206; H eller and Feh er 1988; N air 1992:22 7. 11 Morin's positio n wo uld here be diame trically o pposed to that o f Jean-Marie Guehenno (199 3:12) fo r who m the d ecline o f the natio n signals th e 'end o f d em o cracy': 'We mu st ask o urselves to day whe ther it is p ossible to have d em ocracy witho ut a natio n.' 12 Sami N air makes a similar point in relatio n to Habermas's n o tion o f a public space o f 'communicative ratio nality': In reality, this approach simply displaces the problem o f social transformation on to a space d eem ed to be o pen- that o f democratic discussio n-while forgetting that the real problem is precisely the already achieved fu sion o f the channels o f finance, power and the perverted sys tem o f democracy itself. (Morin and N air 1997:223)

Conclusion Fo r a similar ' futuri stic visio n o f the urban industrial wo rld o f capitali st d evelo pment and autho ritarian politics' (Wes twood and Williams 1997: 3) , see al so Fritz Lang 's M etropolis (192 7) and Ridley Sco tt's Bladerunner (1981 ).

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Index

Action Fran<;aise 133, 163 Adkins, L. 172 Adler, EH. 165-6 Adorno, T. 13-14,25,28,31,163 aes theticization 4, 23, 28, 51-3, 68-9, 72-86,88-9,91-3,106,117,155 Algeria 164 America 49,58,64-5, 97,100,111,115, 118,142-3,145-6,157,166,172, 174

Anderson, B. 53 Antelme, R. 10 Anthias, E 131 anti-colonialism see colonialism/ anticolonialism anti-humanism see humanism/ antihumanism anti-Semitism 10-12, 15,22,41-2,56, 162-3 Apollinaire, G. 68-9, 91 Apos tolides, ).-M. 163-4 Aragon, L. 68, 85 Arendt, H. 154 Arnold,M. 17, 102, 124 Aron, R. 10 assimilation 2-3, 5, 24, 27, 34, 40-3, 468,57-8,60,67,89, 101, 132-4, 141, 145, 157 Atack, M. 120 Auge,M. 78-9, 81, 83-4, 88, 167 Auschwitz 7, 141, 162, 164; see also Chapter 1 avant-garde 4-5,57, 73, 104-6, 11 7

Bailly, ).-C. 80-1, 83, 87-8, 95 Balandier, G. 77-8, 111-12, 114, 127, 145,169,171 Balibar, E . 44-5, 48, 51,131,133,149-50,155,166, 169 banlieue see suburbs Barbie, K. 12, 35 Barker, M. 44 Barn~s, M. 22-3, 41 ,133 Barthes, R. 25 Bassan, R. 118 Bataille, G. 22, 71 Baudelaire, C. 4, 68-9, 73, 79, 81, 84, 91, 167 Baudrillard,). 8, 32, 50, 57, 73, 80, 82, 84,110-11,119-20,124,145,156, 158-9 Bauman, Z. 5, 9, 14,20,22,27, 40,424,51-2,55,57,65,67,84-9,93, 124-5,165, 169, 171-2 Beauvoir, S. de 120, 157 Beck, U. 9 Bedarida, E 28-9, 31, 36, 164 Beineix, ).-). 118 Bejin, A. 166 Bell,D.103-4,119 Benda,). 124 Benjamin, W 32, 66, 68-9, 85-6, 108 Bennington, G. 16 Benoist, A. de 47, 165-6 Bensoussan, G. 164 Berman, M. 124 Bernal, M. 19 Bernstein, M.A. 10,13,28 Bertheleu, H. 60, 64

192

Index

Besson, L. 118 Bhabha, H. 64 Birnbaum, P. 22 Blanchot, 11. 22-3, 25-6, 28, 162-3 Blatt, D. 58 body, the 21,60,66,82-3,110,131,

133, 136, 156, 170 Body-Gendrot, S. 75 Bourdieu, P. 173 Bouretz, P. 18 Boyarin, D. 23-4, 28,162 Boyarin,]. 23-4, 28, 162 Bradbury, 11. 68 Breton, A. 68, 85, 91 Brubaker, R. 132 Bruckner, P. 99 capitalism 8, 33, 47, 52, 54, 57, 67, 73-4,

87,106-8,117,120-2,129,142,144, 151,155,167,174 Carax, L. 118 Cardinal, 11. 22 Carpentras 61 Castells, 11. 77 Castoriadis, C. 60, 105, 113-14, 121, 126,135, 137, 143, 164-6 Certeau, 11. de 67-8, 77, 79, 81, 91, 102 Chambat, P. 170 Chaumont, ].-11. 11-12, 35 Chemetov, P. 78, 158, 167 Chesneaux,]. 142, 150 Chevalier, L. 67 Cheyette, B. 21, 162 Choay, F. 80, 82-3 citizens/citizenship 3, 6-8, 34, 62, 70, 76-8,90-1,103,109,157,167,1724; see also Chapter 5 city 4, 7-8, 45, 57, 132, 155, 157-8, 166-9; see also Chapter 3 civil society 116, 129-30, 134-44, 146 Cixous, H. 123, 172 class 2, 4, 49-50, 53-4, 56, 67, 69, 70,

74-5,81, 104, 129, 134, 136, 143, 149 Cohen-Tanugi, L. 138-9, 169

colonialism/anti-colonialism 2-4, 40-1,

44,46-7,57,115,134,165 commodification see consumption communications/information 44, 50,

52,54,57,73-4,76-7,79-80,83,89, 109-10,112-14,134,142,144,151, 154, 156-8,169,171 community/ communitarianism 16, 41, 50-5,59,62,65,90,93-5,100,12930, 132-3, 137, 141, 143, 145, 148-9, 153, 155, 168 Conan, E. 11 Conley, v.A. 77,79,90,114 Connor, S. 8, 111, 121, 141 consumption 5, 38, 49, 51, 70, 75, 7980,83,85-7,89,91,93,96,99,1059,111,115,117-23,137,142,144-5, 147,155,167,172,174 counter-culture(s) 3-6,8,47,105,11727, 129, 169 culture 2, 4-8,13,17-20,33,42,44-7, 50-2,54-6,60-1,65,73-6,78,1324, 139-42, 144, 146, 148-9, 153-4, 161-2,166,168-73; see also Chapter 4 Daudet, L. 22 Dauncey, H. 170 D ebord, G. 120 D ebray, R. 82, 101, 109-12, 114, 119,

124, 136, 144, 151-2, 155, 159, 168, 170-1 deconstruction 6-7, 18-20, 28, 33, 357, 155, 164 D eguy, 11. 30 Delacampagne, C. 161 D elannoi, G. 42 Deleuze, G. 88 Delphy, C. 172 democracy/ democratization 5-6, 8, 14, 23,33-4,37-8,45, 56-7, 59, 62-4, 71,73,75,84,86-8,97,99,102-5, 108,110-18,120,126,130,132, 135-6, 138-42, 144-8, 150-1, 15660,165,167,170-1,173-4

Index

Derrida,J. 14--15, 17,20,25-7,33-5, 127, 162-3 Dews, P. 152 difference 3, 7-8, 12-13, 16-17,21,234,27,34,37-65,78,89-90,92-3, 95-6, 100, 123, 125, 133, 142, 144--6, 148, 151-2, 154--5, 157, 165-6, 168 differend 162, 169 Donald, J. 66, 68, 77 Donzelot, J. 76 Draney 94 Dreyfus, A. 3, 59, 61, 133, 162 droit d14 soli droit d14 sang 41-2, 132 Drumont, E. 22, 133 Dubet, F. 49, 58, 134--5, 148 Duchen, C. 146 Dumont, L. 147 education 49, 58, 62, 97-9, 101, 109, 112,124,129,168,170,172-3 Ehrenberg, A. 105, 110, 113, 136-7, 143, 169-70 emancipation 13, 53, 59, 100, 104, 138, 151,154, 164--5 Enlightenment 1-2, 6-7, 14,21,41,58, 66,96,99-103,107,111,115-17, 124, 126, 128, 131-3, 147-8, 151, 155,157-60,168-9,171-2 equality/inequality 1, 3, 6, 42, 49, 60-1, 66-7,70,74-5,88,90,103-5,110, 128-9, 131, 133, 135-6, 142, 144-7, 174 Eslin, J.- C. 21 ethics 7, 16-18, 37-9, 65, 88-9, 91, 135, 139-42, 144, 157-9 ethnicity 21, 25, 42, 45, 49, 54--5, 58-60, 62-4, 100, 102, 131, 135, 137, 146, 148,168,173 everyday life 4,54,58,60,69-70,86,96, 102,104,108,114,116,137,140-1 exclusion 47, 49, 56, 59, 64, 75-6, 1434, 149-50, 167 Fanon, F. 46 fascism 11, 14, 33, 116, 164, 166

193

Faye, J.-P. 163 Featherstone, M. 169 Feher, F. 59, 174 Felman, S. 26, 35 Finkielkraut, A. 59, 98-100, 102-3, 108, 111-12,124,141-2,154--5,157-9, 168-9,173 Fitoussi,J.-P. 143 flane14r69, 70, 72, 78, 81, 83-8, 91, 117, 123, 167 Forbes,J. 74,80,120 Foucault, M. 42, 50, 67, 72-4, 77 French Revolution 1, 34, 103, 128, 1312,142,149,173 Freund, J. 166 Friedlander, S. 36 Frodon, J.-M. 118 Front National 48, 50, 58, 60-1, 149, 165-6 Fukuyama, F. 126 Fumaroli, M. 98-103, 108, 112, 124, 168-9 Gaspard, F. 58, 146 Gates, H.L. 56 Gauchet, M. 103-4, 138, 168 Gaulle, C. de 6, 12,97 gender 2, 21-2, 62, 67, 69-70, 87, 104-5, 123, 128, 131, 133-4, 138, 145-6, 150,172 G enestier, P. 75 Germany 11, 35-6, 42, 58, 100, 116, 132-3, 154, 168 Gibson, K. 69 Giddens, A. 78, 138 Gilroy, P. 20, 44--5, 61, 165, 169 Girardet, R. 41 globalization/ localization 4, 44, 49-50, 52,54,57,73-5,77,80,111,123, 134--5, 138, 140-1, 145, 148-50, 153-5 Gobineau, A. de 47 Godard,J. -L. 115, 118, 156 Goux, J.-J. 122 Graham, S. 77

194

Index

Grosz, E. 22, 24 Guattari, F. 88 Guehenno,].-M.174 Guillaume, M. 57, 89-90 Guillaumin, C. 44,46-7,146,165, 172 Habermas,]. 32, 151-2, 165, 174 Hall, S. 64, 130-1 Handelman, S. 17, 19, 163 Hargreaves, A.G. 75 Hartman, G.H. 32-3, 38 Harvey, D. 50, 73 Haussmann, G.-E. 68,71,80 Hayward, S. 118 Heidegger, M. 12-13, 15, 17, 36, 114, 162-3 Held, D. 130-1 hellenism/ hebraism 13-24, 89,162,164 Heller, A. 59, 174 Herder,].G. 42 heritage 83, 101-2, 172-3 Hers, F. 122 history 17-18,20,24-6,28-32,34-8, 54-6,59,72-3,79,82-5,89,93-5, 101,110,112,114,130-1,140,155, 158-9,163-8,172-3 Hobsbawm, E. 129 Holocaust 7, 45-6, 55, 108, 154, 156, 158, 161-5; see also Chapter 1 hooks, b. 123 House,]. 165 humanism/ anti-humanism 6-7,13,1516,43,99-100,114,124-5,128,136, 155, 157-60 identity 7-8, 15, 17,24,41-2,44-5,4955,57-8,60-1,63-5,68,74,78-9, 82-3,88-90,101-2,106,110,113, 117, 127-8,131,135, 137, 141, 143, 145-6, 148-50, 167-8 Ikor, R. 10 image 32-3, 50, 56, 73, 79, 82-3, 91-3, 95,99,108-20,145-6,169,171 immigration/ migration 45,50,58-9, 73, 78,94, 101, 150, 165, 167

individualism 8, 48-9,52,54,56-7,65, 76,99,105,115,129-30,133,136-7, 140-2,145-7,152,155,168,173 information see communications/ information integration 5, 60, 62-3, 101, 135, 137-8, 166 intellectuals/intellectual history 3, 7, 20, 104-5,115-28,158,163, 166-7, 172-4 Irigaray, L. 123, 172 Islam /Muslims 35, 55, 58, 61 Jabes, E. 20, 27, 163 Jameson, F. 8, 106-7, 111, 117, 121 Jess, P. 74 Jews 2-3, 7, 42, 45,51,55,89,94,123, 155, 161-5; see also Chapter 1 Jonas, H. 89 Joyce,]. 162 Judt, T. 126, 173 Kant, E. 13,34,90, 154 Karpik, L. 166 Kedward, H.R. 13 Keith, M. 85, 167 Kellner, D. 111, 124, 145 Khilnani, S. 146-7 Khosrokhavar, F. 58 Klarsfeld, S. 12 knowledge 2, 14,38,85, 107-8,121, 125, 169 Kofman, E. 80, 83 Kofman, S. 26 Kristeva,]. 15-16,25,57,122-3,146, 172 Kritzman, L.D. 24, 26-8,164 Kumar, K. 73, 106-7, 169 Kureishi, H. 51 La Capra, D. 36 Lacan, ]. 20 Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 14-15, 19, 34 Lang, F. 174 Lang,]. 97-9

Index

Lanzmann, C. 10,12,30-1,163-4 Lapeyronnie, D. 40, 49 Lash, S. 23, 138 Latarjet, B. 122 Le Goff,].-P. 56, 114, 170-3 Le Pen, ].-M. 12,35,45,50,58,61 Lebas, E. 80 Leca,]. 129-30, 143 Leclerc, A. 22 Lefebvre, H. 66, 80, 87, 137, 166 Lehrer, N. 164 Leiris, M. 46 Leonard, D. 172 Levinas, E. 13,16-18,20, 162 Levi-Strauss, C. 40, 46-7, 165 Levy, B.-H. 126 liberalism 33, 59, 65, 87, 104-5, 116, 123, 126, 129-30, 136, 138-9, 142-4, 146-7,153,163-4,173-4 Lindenberg, D. 11 Lipovetsky, G. 48, 54, 56, 75-6, 86, 1025,116,118-120,136-7,139-41,152, 155, 169-70 localization see globalization / localization Looseley, D.L. 97-8, 116, 169 Loyer, F 67 Lyotard,].-F 5, 8,14-16,21-3,25-6, 29,31-4,48,51,84,107-8,122-3, 125, 127, 138, 151-2, 162-5, 169, 173 Macey, D. 126 McGuigan,]. 116 McKinney, M. 75 Maffesoli, M. 53-4, 56, 65 Mallarme, S. 25 Malraux, A. 97, 99 Man, P. de 12, 34-6 Marinetti, FT. 156 Marks, E. 26, 28, 35-6 Marx, K. 111, 126, 129-30 Maspero, F 91-5, 152, 167-8 Massey, D. 74 Maurras, C. 22

195

media 11, 54, 61, 73, 82-3, 99, 109-10, 112-13,118,121,144,151,169, 171 Mehlman,]. 163 Melucci, A. 52-3, 107 Memmi,A.46 memory 8, 17,28-30,32,38,60, 72, 82-3,85,93-4,156,164 Michelet,]. 41, 131 migration see immigration/ migration Minc,A. 5, 116, 159 Mitterrand, F 33, 61, 97-8, 101 modernism 3-5, 31, 68-70, 72, 79, 81, 83-4,86-7,96,103-6,108,117,119, 122,134, 149 Moi, T. 123 Mongin, 0.13,16-17,19,29-32,35, 37,71,76,83-4,90,102,108,110, 112, 115-16,126,136, 141, 162-3, 167-8,174 Morin, E. 110, 120, 130, 137, 140, 1489,158,174 Mouffe, C. 143,148 Mo urier, M. 114 MRAP 10 multiculturalism 58, 63 Munster, A. 18 Muslims see Islam/Muslims myth 4,16,34,44,58,68-9,83,91,143, 148-9, 151 Nair, S. 49-50, 57-8, 119, 134-5, 137, 142, 173--4 Nancy,].-L. 15,16,24,34 nation 1-6, 8, 29, 40, 42, 44-5, 49-50, 52,54,58-9,62,94,96-9,101,103, 105,108,111-12,114,116,128, 130-6, 138-40, 143-50, 153, 157, 159,166,168,170,174 nationalism 41, 48, 58, 62, 116, 139, 166, 174 Nazism/Nazis 11, 13, 30, 33-7, 40, 44, 58,94, 154-6, 162, 164 negationism see revisionism Negritude 165 neo- tribes 53-5, 65, 137, 140, 142

196

Index

New Right 47-8,52,59,166 Newman, C. 56 Nicolet, C. 49, 58 Nietzsche, F. 162 Noiriel, G. 52 nomads 21, 24, 51, 88-9, 93, 123 Nora, P. 29, 101, 125, 158 Norindr, P. 98 Norris, C. 123, 152 Ophuls, M. 12 'other'/'otherness' 2, 7, 9, 14-19,23-8,

34,37-41,43-5,47,52-3,55-7,65, 68,85,88-90,92-3,122-3,133,141, 152, 155-6, 159, 163, 165, 167 Ozouf, M. 129, 131 Paquot, T. 86 Paris 4; see also Chapter 3 particularism see universalism/ particularism Paxton, R. 12 people, the 34, 46-7, 99-100, 103, 110,

115-16,130,132 Perec, G. 120 Petain, P. 161 Peters, M. 173 Pile, S. 85 Plant, S. 120 Pollock, G. 69-70 Pomian, K. 5 Portzamparc, C. de 71 post-colonial(ism) 4, 13, 50, 57, 59, 74-

5, 134, 150, 159 post-industrial(ism) 4, 48, 50, 64, 71, 87,

106-7, 111,11 7,144, 169 post-structuralism 7, 36-7, 81, 114, 172 power 2, 44-5,50-1,68,70,77,79-80,

123, 129 Prendergast, C. 67, 70, 80 private sphere see publici private spheres Proust, M. 30, 72-3 publici private spheres 2-3, 6, 8, 49, 58,

60-2,67,69-70, 76, 82, 93, 100, 105,

127-31, 134-5, 139-40, 144-5, 1513,157,170,174 Pugh, A.C. 115-16 race/ racism/ racialization/ antiracism 2-

3,7-8,75,100,116,128,133,138, 141,150,155-6,165-6; see also Chapter 2 Rattansi, A. 44, 58, 64 Reader, K. 114 Readings, B. 152 reason/ rationality/ rationalization 1, 4-

6,13,15,31,34,41-3,51,53-4,5961,66-8,70,72,74,84-5,87,91, 96-7,100,106-7,109,114,119, 123-4, 128, 130-4, 146-52, 157-9, 164-5,170, 173-4 Reda,]. 79, 83, 85 religion 33, 42, 45, 49, 59, 61, 100 Renan, E. 21,42-3,45, 132, 143, 165, 168 Renaut, A. 129 republic/republicanism 1, 3, 6, 8, 11, 33-4,42,49,58-63,66,99, 102-3, 108,111-12,114-17,124,126,12830, 133, 135-42, 145-7, 150, 152-3, 155,157,159,163,168,170-3 Resnais, A. 11, 161, 163 revisionism 32-4, 36, 38, 55, 126, 173 Ricoeur, P. 18 Rieffel, R. 126 Rifkin, A. 70 Rigaud,]. 169 Rigby, B. 116 rights 47, 59, 60-1, 103, 11 7, 129-32, 136, 143, 146-50, 165 Rimbaud, A. 106 Rioux,].-P. 101 Rolin,]. 93 Roman,]. 64, 76, 86, 143, 149, 169 Roncayolo, M. 66-7 Rosanvallon, P. 143 Rose, C;. 13, 19-20, 28, 34, 39,89, 93, 151 Rosenzweig, F. 18

Index

Ross,K. 73, 115, 137, 166 Rousseau, J -J 42, 131 Rousset, D. 10 Rousso, H. 11-13, 33 Russell, D. 118 Sallenave, D. 169 Sansot, P 79 Sartre, J-P 10, 23-4, 46, 136, 166 Schiffer, S.D. 126 Schlegel, J -L. 18 Schnapper, D. 59, 128, 132, 145, 150 school see education Schwarz-Bart, A. 10 Schwarzmantel, J 4 science 1,5,97,108,130-1,134, 146, 148-9, 154-9 Scott, R. 174 secularism 6, 49, 58, 103, 134 Segalen, M. 79 Sheringham, M. 77-8, 85, 167 Shoah see Holocaust Sibony, D. 43,45, 52 Silverman, M. 7, 40, 42, 45, 55, 58-9, 125, 132, 150, 168 Simon, C. 72 Sirinelli, J - F. 126 Situationists 120 social, the 72-86, 142-53 social movements 46, 138 socialism 130, 144, 147 Soja, E. 72 Sollers, P 123 SOS Racisme 59, 61 space/spatialization 31, 50-1, 53, 57, 71-86,92-4,105-7,112,117,142, 167-8 spectacle 56, 69, 81, 84, 86, 99, 109-10, 118,120-1,144-5,149,170-1 Spielberg, S. 164 Spire, A. 126 Spivak, G. 172 sport 11 0, 119, 136, 156 state 3, 13, 44, 46, 48-9, 52-3, 61, 67, 96-9,101,109,113,116,123,126-

197

31, 134-40, 142-4, 146-7, 149-50, 155,157,171 Steiner, G. 124, 162, 165 Stern, D. 20 Sternhell, Z. 42 Stoekl, A. 22-3, 26 suburbs 45, 58, 75-6,81,90-3, 152 Suleiman, S.R. 24 Surrealism 4, 86, 106 Taguieff, P -A. 40-1, 44, 46-7,50,55, 60-2, 165-6 Tassin, E . 150 technology 14, 32, 50, 73-4, 77-9, 89, 95, 106, 108-15, 127, 134, 138, 145, 148-9, 151, 154-9 Tester, K. 88-9 Third Republic 3, 50, 52, 58-9 Thompson, K. 149 time 31, 50-1, 57, 71-86, 92-4, 105-6, 112,117, 142, 150, 166-8 Tocqueville, A. de 114, 173 Todd, E. 59 Todorov, T. 30,37-8,41,45,58-9,102, 113,131,156,162-3,165-6 Touraine, A. 1,49,59-60,63-4,75,97, 102, 106, 132, 138, 143-4, 147-9, 158,172 tourists 83-4, 122, 154-5 UNESCO 46 universalism/ particularism 1-3, 5-6, 14, 24,27-8,34,40-9,51,54,58-64,74, 95-8, 100, 102-4, 109, 124-5, 12833, 135-6, 138, 142, 145-8, 155, 157, 160,165-6,168,171,173 Urry, J 84 Utopia 2,8,32,37-8,41,43,59,66,68, 71,74,76,87,105,112,128-36,149, 152, 155-6, 160, 167, 169 Valery, P 162 Verges, J 35, 164 Vichy 11-13, 33, 42, 61, 161 Vidal-Naquet, P. 30-1

198

Index

Vilaine, A.-M. de 163 violence 19, 22, 24, 26, 28,32,34,43, 55-6,64,75,83,141,162 Virilio, P. 76-9, 81, 83, 89-90, 92, 95, 108, 112-14,156-9, 171,1 73-4 Volk/ Volksgeist 34, 41, 100, 115 Walby, S. 150 Walz er, M . 127 Watson, S. 69 Weber, E . 42, 131 Weeks, J. 94-5, 174 Westwood, S. 174 Whiteread, R. 164

Wieviorka, A. 11-12, 161-2 Wieviorka, M. 40-1, 44, 48-9, 60-4, 134-5, 137, 148, 166 Williams, J. 174 Wilson, E. 69-70 Wittig, M. 172 Wolff, J. 69-70 Wolton, D. 168 Wood, N. 13 Yerushalmi, YH. 17 Yonnet, P. 4, 59, 75, 116, 166, 169 Young, R. 162 Yuval-Davis, N. 131,150